Beth Alison Shapiro (born January 14, 1976) is an American evolutionary molecular biologist, associate director for conservation genomics at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. She also teaches in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Shapiro's work has centered on the analysis of ancient DNA. She was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2006 She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.
Early life and education
On January 14, 1976, Shapiro was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Rome, Georgia, where she served as a local news presenter while attending Rome High School.
In 1994, Shapiro graduated from Rome High School with a GPA of 4.0, and entered the University of Georgia. She studied Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English literature, and geology prior to choosing ecology as her major.
Career
In 2004, Shapiro was appointed a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and director of the Henry Wellcome Biomolecules Centre at Oxford, a position she held until 2007. In 2006, she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
Shapiro's research on ecology has been published in journals Science, In 2007, she was named by Smithsonian magazine as one of 37 young American innovators under the age of 36.
In 2024, Shapiro was appointed as chief science officer of Colossal Biosciences to help the company meet its de-extinction and species preservation goals. In the same year, Shapiro received backlash and become a target of fan activism and trolling from fans of the Jurassic Park media franchise for stating dinosaur de-extinction is impossible, or at least not possible in the way it is commonly depicted in science fiction.
In 2025, Colossal announced that they had created woolly mice as part of the process of bringing back mammoths. When this was dismissed by philosopher Craig Callender as "a stunt", Shapiro replied, "Some people argue that our whole company is a stunt... Gene editing could be used to help species become resistant to disease, to restore missing genetic variation or to correct gene sequences that lead to genetic disease but have become fixed in that population."
In 2025, Colossal claimed that it had resurrected the dire wolf which was disputed by the science community. As part of the project, Colossal also said it cloned several red wolves, an American species of wolves considered to be one of the most endangered wolves in the world.
Publications
Shapiro's peer reviewed publications in scientific journals
- Rise and fall of the Beringian steppe bison
- Ancient DNA: Methods and Protocols
- How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction
- Flight of the Dodo
- A late Pleistocene steppe bison (Bison priscus) partial carcass from Tsiigehtchic, Northwest Territories, Canada
Honors and awards
- Time 100 Most Influential People in Health (2025)
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023)
- National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer (2010)
- University of Georgia Young Alumnus Award (2010)
- MacArthur Fellowship (2009)
Personal life
Shapiro is married to biomolecular engineering professor Richard Edward Green and has two sons.