Christina Nielsen-Marsh, Ph.D.

My research, since completing my doctoral studies at Oxford, has lain with the alteration and preservation, at the biomolecular level, of skeletal remains in the geological environment. Typically, organic material from fossils only survives in very small quantities and often in degraded and contaminated forms. With these limitations to consider, recent technical advances in the fields of biochemistry and proteomics are particularly appropriate for exploitation by molecular palaeontologists for the analysis of ancient organic material. From 2001 I have been involved with the development and application of biological mass spectrometry and in particular matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS) to proteins recovered from archaeological and palaeontological bones. I undertook this work first at Michigan State University followed by the Universities of Newcastle and York, and was funded by the Wellcome Trust Bioarchaeological Initiative, until my move to the Department of Human Evolution in September 2004.