Christina Warinner

Dr. Christina Warinner earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010, and received her postdoctoral training at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Since 2014, she is a Presidential Research Professor and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, where she is pioneering the study of the ancestral human microbiome and ancient diets. In 2014, she published the first detailed characterization of the ancient oral microbiome, and in 2015, she published a seminal study on the identification of milk proteins in ancient dental calculus and the reconstruction of prehistoric European dairying practices. In the same year, she also was part of a large team that the published the first South American hunter-gatherer gut microbiome and identified Treponema as a key missing ancestral microbe in industrialized societies. Her ancient microbiome findings were named among the top 100 scientific discoveries of 2014 by Discover Magazine, and her research has been featured in more than 75 news articles, including stories in Science, Scientific American, the LA Times, the Guardian, and CNN, among others. She has been featured in multiple documentaries, and her current work on ancient Nepal appears in the award-winning children’s book, Secrets of the Sky Caves (Millbrook Press Trade, 2014). She is a 2014 US National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow and a 2012 TED Fellow. Her TED Talks on ancient dental calculus and the evolution of the human diet have been viewed more than 1.5 million times.