Cláudia F. Lopes Gomes

The bones in a medieval grave can tell you far more than you might expect. Beyond the obvious — age, sex, signs of disease — the DNA preserved within them can reveal how people were related to one another, where their ancestors came from, and sometimes even what they looked like. The same logic applies to a crime scene, a mass grave from a recent conflict, or a paternity case involving degraded biological material. Extracting reliable genetic information from samples that are old, damaged, or in poor condition is the common thread running through Cláudia Lopes Gomes's research.
She is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her work spans two fields — forensic genetics, applied in criminal investigations and legal contexts, and archaeogenetics, which uses the same techniques to study past populations through their biological remains. The methodological challenges overlap considerably: in both cases, the DNA is often fragmentary, contaminated, or present in very low quantities.
Much of her research has focused on prehistoric and historical populations in the Iberian Peninsula. She has analysed the DNA of individuals buried in Neolithic sites in Catalonia and Andorra, traced mitochondrial lineages in remains from ancient Gadir (modern Cádiz), and worked on the genetic identification of victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) — a task that still has direct relevance to families searching for missing relatives today.
Some of the questions she and her colleagues address feel surprisingly intimate, given the age of the material: were two people buried together actually related? Could a particular individual be the biological parent of a child found in the same grave? These are not abstract puzzles but ones that carry real historical — and sometimes legal — weight. The forensic side of her work raises a different set of questions, though the underlying difficulty is often the same. Biological samples recovered from crime scenes, legal investigations, or mass casualty events are frequently degraded, present in minimal quantities, or mixed with material from multiple individuals. Her research has addressed several of these practical problems directly: the behaviour of DNA on surfaces subject to secondary transfer, the performance of extraction and amplification protocols on low-template samples, and the statistical frameworks used to establish or exclude kinship when standard methods fall short. She has also contributed to building reference databases — including allele and haplotype frequency data for X-chromosome insertion-deletion markers in the Spanish population — which underpin the probability calculations on which forensic conclusions depend.
Her work is published in international journals, including Forensic Science International: Genetics and the Journal of Archaeological Science, and she contributed to the 2026 Academic Press volume DNA in Health, Identity, and Ancestry.