Alisa Kazarina is TEDxRiga Story Hunt 2016 winner and a microbiologist whose desire is to explore how microbes influence human health and how investigating ancient human-related microorganisms could help researchers to study these relationships.

In her job at the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Center, Alisa investigates the remains of ancient human-related microbes that can be found within archaeological material with the help of a new multi-disciplinary area of research — biomolecular archaeology.

In parallel, Alisa Kazarina is working towards her PhD thesis investigating the evolution of human-related microbial communities (i.e. human microbiome) and to detect and study ancient human pathogens like Mycobacterium tuberculosis.