Maria Spyrou received her PhD in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Germany) in 2018 with a primary focus on the retrieval and analysis of ancient pathogen genomes. Her PhD research was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for
Biography
Maria Spyrou received her PhD in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Germany) in 2018 with a primary focus on the retrieval and analysis of ancient pathogen genomes. Her PhD research was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for the reconstruction of the genetic history of Yersinia pestis from as far back as the Bronze Age as well as from its infamous historical eruptions during the First and Second Plague Pandemics. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Germany) and her work broadly focuses on the evolution and history of infectious diseases as well as on how past epidemics/pandemics have shaped human societies. She approaches these topics through the analysis of ancient DNA and specifically through the investigation of bacterial, viral and eukaryotic pathogen DNA traces from ancient human remains. Her work has contributed in the evolutionary reconstruction of whole ancient pathogen genomes from various historical and prehistoric archaeological contexts, including the discovery of the origins of the medieval Black Death pandemic.