Melinda A. Zeder is an American archaeologist and Curator Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.
[1][2] Zeder received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1985 with a dissertation focused on faunal assemblages from the site of Tal-e Malyan in southeastern Iran.
She later founded a zooarchaeological consulting firm, and secured a position at the Smithsonian Institution in 1992 as a research scientist in archaeobiology.
Her research focuses on the origins of plant and animal domestication, and the impacts of agriculture on human prehistory.
She is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and previously the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration.