Jelena Jovanović

Dr Jelena Jovanović is a Senior Researcher at the BioSense Institute. She received her BA (2010), MA (2011), and PhD (2017) degrees from the Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia, in the field of Physical Anthropology. Starting from 2013 she has been working as Teaching Assistant, and from 2018 as Assistant Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. She was engaged as a researcher on various national and international projects (such as fp7, bilateral), including H2020 project BIRTH (Births, mothers and babies: prehistoric fertility in the Balkans between 10,000-5000 BC), the first project in Serbia supported by the European Research Council (ERC). Through several internships in LAMPEA laboratory (Aix-Marseille University, France), she was trained in the field of stable isotope analysis, while as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) she gain knowledge in analysis of ancient dental calculus. Jelena’s area of expertise is physical anthropology, with a special emphasis on the reconstruction of diet and health of the Balkans Mesolithic-Neolithic communities. In her research, she is combining macroscopic physical anthropological methods with state-of-the-art methods, such as stable isotopes and chemical analyses of food microparticles entrapped in dental calculus, as a tool for understanding ancient dietary practices and disease. Her research interests also include the role of carbohydrates in the diet of Balkans prehistoric communities and the impact of food on overall wellbeing, health and fertility.