Beth Shapiro received a B.S. (1999) and M.S. (1999) from the University of Georgia and a D.Phil. (2003) from the University of Oxford. She was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford prior to her appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Pennsylvania State University in 2007. Her scientific articles have appeared in such journals as Science, Molecular Biology and Evolution, and PLoS Biology.