Beth Shapiro

The keynotes by Beth Shapiro explore the reasons for the diminishing number of species on the Earth's surface, and the reasons behind extinction. She describes the point in time when species enter a bottleneck, and the situational factors that determine the future for these species.

Beth Shapiro is an American evolutionary molecular biologist who earned a B.A. and M.A. in ecology from the University of Georgia. In 2004, she was a Wellcome trust Research Fellow at Oxford, and was the director of the Henry Wellcome Biomolecules Centre at Oxford. Beth Shapiro has been featured in numerous magazines including PLoS Biology, Science and Molecular Biology and Evolution.

For her efforts, Beth Shapiro earned a spot in Smithsonian Magazine's one of '37 young American innovators under the age of 36' in 2007. The keynotes by Beth Shapiro identify the causes of population decline in plants and animals in hopes for preventing further demise in the future.