Rate My Professor Charoula Fotiadou

Charoula Maria Fotiadou, M.Sc., B.A., is a Doctoral Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence HUMAN ORIGINS at the University of Tübingen. She holds a Master’s degree in Natural Science Archaeology from the Prehistory and Archaeological Sciences program in the Faculty of Science at the University of Tübingen, completed between 2019 and 2021, with a thesis titled ‘The demographic history of Neanderthals inferred from new mitochondrial DNA genomes’. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Ioannina between 2013 and 2018. Her research centers on the bio-cultural evolution of Late Pleistocene and early Holocene European hunter-gatherers, with a particular focus on demographic history, population structure, genetic ancestry, mobility, and social organization, integrating ancient DNA analysis, population genomics, bioinformatics, archaeological, isotopic, and morphological data. Since 2026 she has served as Doctoral Researcher in the Cluster of Excellence HUMAN ORIGINS. From 2023 to the present she has worked as External Researcher on uncovering the phenotype of past human populations under Dr. Lara Rubio Arauna at the University of Tübingen, developing analysis pipelines in R and Python for ancient DNA data. Between 2021 and 2025 she was Associated Researcher on Neanderthal aDNA and demography under Prof. Cosimo Posth at the University of Tübingen, gaining experience in aDNA analyses and bioinformatics tools. She also contributed to projects on civic engagement and service-learning between 2020 and 2024. In 2026 she was first author of the publication ‘Archaeogenetic insights into the demographic history of Late Neanderthals’ in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Additional contributions include a 2022 co-authored guideline on service-learning and several congress presentations on topics including transversal competences, social responsibility, human skeletal analysis, and mobility of archaic Homo species.

Charoula Fotiadou’s work is situated within the Faculty of Science at the University of Tübingen, specifically in the Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics group of the Institute for Archaeological Sciences in the Department of Geosciences. Her academic appointments and research activities emphasize interdisciplinary approaches combining genetics with archaeology to reconstruct past human population histories. No major awards, fellowships, editorial roles, or committee positions are documented in official university profiles. Her contributions to the field include advancing understanding of Neanderthal demographic dynamics through mitochondrial DNA studies and broader applications of ancient genomics to European forager groups.