Beth Alison Shapiro (born January 14, 1976) is an American evolutionary molecular biologist, associate director for conservation genomics at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. She also teaches in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In March 2024, Shapiro began a three year sabbatical to become the chief scientific officer of Colossal Biosciences.

Shapiro's work has centered on the analysis of ancient DNA. She was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2006 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009. She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.

On January 14, 1976, Shapiro was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Rome, Georgia, where she served as a local news presenter while attending Rome High School.

In 1994, Shapiro graduated from Rome High School with a GPA of 4.0, and entered the University of Georgia. She studied Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English literature, and geology prior to choosing ecology as her major.

In 1999, Shapiro graduated summa cum laude with BA and MA degrees in ecology. The same year, she was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

In 2003, Shapiro completed a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford for research on inferring evolutionary history and processes using ancient DNA supervised by Alan J. Cooper.

In 2004, Shapiro was appointed a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and director of the Henry Wellcome Biomolecules Centre at Oxford, a position she held until 2007. In 2006, she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. While at the Biomolecules Centre, Shapiro carried out mitochondrial DNA analysis of the dodo.

Shapiro's research on ecology has been published in journals including Molecular Biology and Evolution, PLOS Biology, Science, and Nature. In 2007, she was named by Smithsonian magazine as one of 37 young American innovators under the age of 36.