Beth Alison Shapiro

About

Beth Alison Shapiro is a Professor in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department within the Division of Physical & Biological Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. She is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on understanding how populations and species change through time, particularly in response to environmental and habitat changes. Her group employs the latest experimental and computational approaches to analyze genetic information isolated from fossil and archived remains, with a special interest in the processes of speciation and extinction. Dr. Shapiro's educational background includes a BS and MS in Ecology from the University of Georgia, obtained in 1999, and a DPhil in Zoology from Oxford University, completed in 2003. Her expertise encompasses ancient DNA, genomics, ecology, molecular evolution, and evolution. She has received numerous awards and honors, including being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2009, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2010, and a Packard Fellow in 2010. Her work aims to shed light on the mechanisms driving evolutionary change by analyzing genetic data from historical and fossilized remains.

Research topics

• Biology
• Genetics
• Evolutionary biology
• Ecology
• Computational biology
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Zoology
• Demography
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Towards complete and error-free genome assemblies of all vertebrate species

  Nature · 2021 · 2980 citations

  has worked over a five-year period to evaluate and develop cost-effective methods for assembling highly accurate and nearly complete reference genomes. Here we present lessons learned from generating assemblies for 16 species that represent six major vertebrate lineages. We confirm that long-read sequencing technologies are essential for maximizing genome quality, and that unresolved complex repeats and haplotype heterozygosity are major sources of assembly error when not handled correctly. Our…

  DOI

• Dense sampling of bird diversity increases power of comparative genomics

  Nature · 2020 · 535 citations

  , and captures only a fraction of the genomic diversity. Here we report a substantial step towards the dense representation of avian phylogenetic and molecular diversity, by analysing 363 genomes from 92.4% of bird families-including 267 newly sequenced genomes produced for phase II of the Bird 10,000 Genomes (B10K) Project. We use this comparative genome dataset in combination with a pipeline that leverages a reference-free whole-genome alignment to identify orthologous regions in greater numbe…

  DOI

• The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

  Nature · 2021 · 396 citations

  .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Million-year-old DNA sheds light on the genomic history of mammoths

  Nature · 2021 · 343 citations

  DOI

• 863 genomes reveal the origin and domestication of chicken

  Cell Research · 2020 · 291 citations

  DOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Inferring admixture history in non-model organisms using local ancestry detection

  NSF · $600k · 2018–2023

• Collaborative Research: Land Bridges, Ice-Free Corridors, and Biome Shifts: Impacts on the Evolution and Extinction of Horses in Ice-Age Beringia

  NSF · $423k · 2015–2019

• Collaborative research: Understanding the role of environmental change on the long-term population dynamics of one surviving and two extinct arctic mammals

  NSF · $268k · 2009–2012

Frequent coauthors

• Alexei J. Drummond

  University of Auckland

  779 shared

• H. Bradley Shaffer

  California Department of Conservation

  763 shared

• Brant C. Faircloth

  Louisiana State University

  758 shared

• Michael Charleston

  University of Tasmania

  757 shared

• Bastien Boussau

  Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive

  757 shared

• F. Keith Barker

  Science Museum of Minnesota

  756 shared

• John E. McCormack

  755 shared

• John Trueman

  Australian National University

  754 shared

Labs

• Beth Alison Shapiro LabPI

Education

• DPhil, Zoology

  University of Oxford

  2003

Awards & honors

• Packard Fellow, 2010
• PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellow, 2010
• National Geographic Emerging Explorer, 2010
• MacArthur Fellow, 2009
• Searle Scholar, 2009

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz

• Auston Marmaduke Kilpatrickh-83
• John N Thompsonh-78
• Peter T Raimondih-61