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María Martinón-Torres

CENIEH Director, Atapuerca Research Team and author of "Homo imperfectus" (Ed. Destino), Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH)

María Martinón-Torres, PhD in Medicine and Surgery (Universidad Santiago de Compostela), MPhil in Human Origins (University of Bristol) and Forensic Anthropology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) is currently Director of CENIEH and Honorary Professor at the Anthropology Department of University College London. Member of the Atapuerca Research Team since 1998 and co-Principal Investigator sin 2019, she has research interests in hominin palaeobiology, palaeopathology and the evolutionary scenario of first Europeans. She has leaded and participated in several international projects related to the study of the hominin dental evidence such as Dmanisi (Georgia) and China, and published more than 70 publications among books, book chapters or scientific articles in SCI journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS or Journal of Human Evolution. Her work has been highlighted as Top 1% of most cited authors in Social Sciences according to Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators. In 2021, she published in Nature the earliest human burial in Africa, a research that deserved the front cover of the journal. In 2019 she received the Rivers Memorial Medal awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI), the oldest academic institution in the world dedicated to anthropology. In 2022 she published a popular science book "Homo imperfectus". Why do we continue to get sick in spite of evolution? (Ed. Destino-Grupo Planeta)

Experience

  • –present
    Lecturer Anthropology, UCL