Jelena Jovanović

Dr Jelena Jovanović is a Senior Research Associate at the BioSense Institute, working within the Centre for Biosystems. She received her PhD in Archaeology in 2017 from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade in the field of Biological 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 ERC project BIRTH. Since 2023, she has been Principal Investigator of the MOVE project financed by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia. 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 gains knowledge in analysis of ancient dental calculus. Jelena’s area of expertise is biological anthropology, with a special emphasis on the reconstruction of diet, mobility and health of the Balkans Mesolithic-Neolithic communities. In her research, she is combining macroscopic bioanthropological 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 diseases. She has also been using and crossing multiple data on subsistence (C, N, S stable isotope ratios), mobility (Sr radiogenic signal), and ancestry (aDNA) to access the lifestyle of the Neolithic communities in the region.