Maria Lopopolo
Postdoctoral researcher
Institut Pasteur in Paris, France.
Biography
Maria Lopopolo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where she studies the evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases using Bayesian modelling and ancient DNA. She earned her PhD in the Microbial Paleogenomics Unit at Pasteur, reconstructing genomes of ancient pathogens and microbiomes—such as Mycobacterium lepromatosis and ancient oral bacteria—to reveal how microbes have influenced human evolution over millennia. Her research sheds light on how diseases emerged, spread, and coexisted with human populations.
Before moving into paleogenomics, she worked at the University of Oxford, applying next-generation sequencing to cancer genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenetics. With training in molecular and population genomics, Lopopolo connects modern bioinformatics with archaeological data, helping to reshape our understanding of pathogen evolution—most notably showing that leprosy reached the Americas long before European contact.
