Anna Cipriani is an Associate Professor of Geochemistry and Volcanology in the Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she teaches undergraduate and master students how chemical elements interact and behave on and within the Earth. Her main expertise is in the use of isotope and elemental geochemistry to investigate the processes of oceanic crust creation and evolution at mid ocean ridges, by examining mantle and crustal rocks outcropping at the ocean floor and in ophiolite sequences. She also uses Sr isotopes to date marine carbonates and fossils through the principles of Sr isotope stratigraphy. More recently, her work has broadened to include the application of geochemical analyses in archaeology, environmental and forensic studies. She is also actively participating in geo-wiki.org, a project that uses open source information and collection of crowdsourced spatial data to improve the interpretation of satellite imagery to better detect changes occurring on the Earth’s surface. In 2019, during an oceanographic expedition to the Equatorial Atlantic ocean, she dove to the bottom of the ocean with the French submersible Nautile to a depth of 5573 to explore and sample plate boundaries where new oceanic crust is created. You can read more about this here: https://5000undersea.unimore.it/
Email: anna.cipriani@unimore.it
Photo credits to Cédric Hamelin.


Federico Lugli is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Institut für Geowissenschaften of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on the use of isotope geochemistry to unravel the interaction between human/animal and environment. In particular, he is interested in the use of strontium isotope analyses of teeth to decrypt mobility patterns and past migrations, but also in the use of stable (non-)traditional isotopes and elemental ratios to investigate trophic chains and diet histories. From a methodological point of view, he is involved in the development of novel methods for high precision and resolution laser ablation ICP mass spectrometry analyses of phosphates, carbonates and other geological/biological matrices. Recently, he started working on proteomic analyses of bones and teeth by LC-MS/MS and MALDI-ToF, to unravel the taxonomy and the sex of humans and animals. His MSCA-IF project AROUSE investigates the hibernation (paleo)ecology of marmots using novel dental biomarkers, including high-spatial resolution trace element and isotopic analyses and dental histomorphometry.
Email: federico.lugli@unimore.it; lugli@em.uni-frankfurt.de


Elena Armaroli is a PhD student at the Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her research focuses on isotope analysis of archaeological fauna remains by MC-ICPMS and IRMS. Through the application of strontium, oxygen and carbon isotope analyses, she studies mobility and migration patterns, diet and paleoenvironment. Recently, she started performing serial sampling and high-spatial resolution LA-(MC-)ICPMS analyses of faunal tooth enamel to study the isotopic variations at (sub)seasonal level. The main goal of her PhD project is to apply these state-of-the-art methodologies – from material sampling to mass spectrometry analysis – to geographically and temporally distant archaeological contexts in Eurasia.
Email: elena.armaroli@unimore.it


Maria De Falco is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She is specialised in archaeometric analyses on archaeological materials (petrography in thin section microscopy, XRD, XRF, ICP-MS and SEM-EDS) and in the study of Italian pre-protohistoric pottery with a focus on technology and productive processes. She particularly developed these skills during her PhD project at Durham University (UK) focused on Copper Age ceramic production from Southern Italy and her work at the Durham Archaeomaterial Research Centre. For her current research project (CAST) she is investigating metalworking ceramic and stone tools from Bronze Age contexts in Northern Italy through advanced archaeometric analyses to unravel the mechanisms and chaîne opératoire of metal circulation and production during the Bronze Age. She has been member of several archaeological excavations in Italy and abroad, both research and commercial, and is specialised also in digital technologies applied to archaeology (photogrammetry, 3d scanning and 3d printing).
Email: maria.defalco@unimore.it