Katerina Douka (born c. 1980) is an archaeological scientist whose work focuses on the spatio-temporal pattern of human dispersals and extinctions across Eurasia, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern Homo sapiens.
During her Linacre fellowship she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the “AHOB3” (Ancient Human Occupation of Britain 3) project funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
[4] During her Brasenose fellowship she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher on an ERC funded project “PalaeoChron” (Precision Dating of the Palaeolithic of Eurasia) led by Professor Tom Higham, based at the RLAHA, School of Archaeology.
In 2017, she joined the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Department of Archaeology, Jena, Germany, where she is Principal Investigator / Group Leader on the “FINDER” (Fossil Fingerprinting and Identification of new Denisovan remains in Pleistocene Asia) project funded by the European Research Council.
[5] She has pioneered the application of the ZooMS technique (Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) to ancient human fossils, enabling the identification of small fragments of bone on the basis of collagen proteins.