Dr. Kistler is an environmental archaeologist who uses ancient DNA and genomics to study the evolution of domestic plants and other human-environment interactions. He is the curator of archaeogenomics and archaeobotany at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in the Department of Anthropology.

Dr. Kistler’s research focuses on combining traditional knowledge and molecular methods to unravel plant domestication, the role of phenotypic plasticity in the onset of domestication, the fundamental evolutionary genomic underpinnings of domestication across species and cultural-ecological contexts, and the domestication of long-lived perennials including tree crops.