Christina (Tina) Warinner

Christina (Tina) Warinner is the Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology in the Departments of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and she leads international research groups at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology in Jena, Germany. She is a member of the Microbiology faculty at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, and the former President of the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA). She is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and she currently serves on the Leadership Team of the Max Planck – Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, the Program Board of the American School for Prehistoric Research, and the Board of Directors of the American Center for Mongolian Studies. She is the Director of the Archaeology Program and the Chair of the Standing Committee on Archaeology at Harvard University.

Warinner specializes in the analysis of ancient DNA and proteins, and her research focuses on the study of ancient biomolecules to better understand past human diet, health, and the evolution of the human microbiome. She conducts studies on the evolution and changing ecology of the human microbiome, including reconstructing the oldest microbiome to date from a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal, and she has published extensively on prehistoric migrations, infectious disease evolution, the origins and spread of dairy pastoralism, and the biodiversity of fermented foods.

She has published two books (Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color) and more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, Nature Genetics, Chemical Reviews, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Current Biology, Nature Communications, Current Anthropology, Latin American Antiquity, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, and the Journal of Archaeological Science. For a comprehensive list, see the publications page of her research website. 

Warinner has served on funding review panels for the US National Institutes of Health and the European Commission, and she currently serves on multiple scientific advisory boards, steering committees, and standing committees related to microbiome research, professional and research ethics, and scientific practice. Warinner strives to make her research and data as accessible as possible, and since 2014, >75% of her journal research articles are available in open access format. Additionally, all published protocols and datasets generated by her lab are available in open access online repositories through protocols.io, NCBI, ENA, and ProteomeXchange, and are also curated on the data resource page of her research website.

She is the recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Sussman Award for Scientific Contributions to Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association’s Exemplary Cross-Fields Award, the Federation of European Microbiological Societies Article Award, and the Shanghai Archaeological Forum Research Award. Her ancient microbiome findings were named among the top 100 scientific discoveries of 2014 by Discover Magazine, and her research on medieval women artists was named one of the top 10 archaeological discoveries of 2019 by Archaeology Magazine. She was named one of the Top 10 Scientists Ready to Transform Their Field in 2017 by Science News, and her research has been featured in more than a hundred news articles and programs, including stories in the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Scientific American, Archaeology Magazine, NPR’s Science Friday, the New Scientist, the Guardian, the Observer, WIRED UK, and CNN, among others.

Warinner has been an invited speaker at events organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Committee, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of London, and the British Academy, and her TED Talks have been viewed more than 2 million times. She is passionate about public education and outreach, and she designed the Dairy Cultures exhibit at the Natural History of Mongolia and co-created the Introduction to Ancient Metagenomics Summer School, which has educated more than 100 aspiring early career scientists from 18 countries. She has been featured in documentaries produced by PBS NOVA, Netflix, and the genome sequencing company Illumina, and her research on ancient Nepal appears in the award-winning children’s book, Secrets of the Sky Caves.  She created the Adventures in Archaeological Science coloring book, now available in more than sixty languages, including many indigenous and underrepresented languages. She is engaged in the open science movement, and her research group has been actively involved in improving scholarly communication, data sharing, and research transparency. 

Warinner received her MA and PhD at Harvard University and completed her postdoctoral training at the Centre for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zürich, Switzerland and the University of Oklahoma. She was previously a Presidential Research Professor and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.

Teaching

• Anthro 1060: Introduction to Archaeological Science

• Anthro 1200: Osteoarchaeology (co-taught with Dr. Richard Meadow)

• Anthro 1255: Human Diet – From Neanderthals to the Future of Food

• Anthro 1270: Sick – 10,000 Years of Health and Disease

• Anthro 2061: Advanced Archaeological Science

• Anthro 3070: Professionalization in Archaeology