Camilla Speller

Camilla Speller is a biomolecular archaeologist.

She completed her BA in Archaeology and Biological Anthropology at the University of Calgary. During her graduate training at Simon Fraser University (supervised by Dr. Dongya Yang), she developed skills in ancient DNA analysis. Her MA used ancient DNA analysis to examine the distribution of salmon species at the Northwest Plateau site of Keatley Creek, BC, Canada. Her PhD dissertation, also completed at SFU in 2009, applied ancient DNA techniques to study the use of wild and domestic turkeys in the Southwest United States.

In 2010, she was awarded a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship to continue her research on North American turkey domestication at the University of Calgary. In 2012, she joined the BioArCh Centre at the University of York, UK as a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow (EU-IIF) where she applied ZooMS and ancient DNA analysis to questions of historic whale exploitation. She led the ancient genomics group at BioArCh until 2018, when she moved back to Vancouver. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and where she directs research into ancient genomic analysis (ancient DNA), ancient proteomics, and collagen peptide mass fingerprinting (ZooMS) in the Ancient DNA and Proteins (ADαPT) Facility.