Beth Alison Shapiro (born January 14, 1976[5]) 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.

[7] She also taught in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

[13] She studied Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English literature, and geology prior to choosing ecology as her major.

[11][5] The same year, she was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship[12] followed by a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford for research on inferring evolutionary history and processes using ancient DNA supervised by Alan J.

[24] In 2024, Shapiro was appointed as chief science officer of Colossal Biosciences to help the company meet its de-extinction and species preservation goals.