Tianrui Zhu specializes in the archaeology of Central Asia and the Eurasian Steppes. The central question to her work is how the Eurasian Steppes connected people, cultures, and technologies. She addresses this question through a multi-disciplinary approach that combines archaeological fieldwork, biomolecular sciences, material sciences, and digital technologies.
Her steppe-ward journey began amid the tropical rainforests of Singapore. She earned her bachelor's degree in History from Yale-NUS College, with a minor in computational and statistical sciences. The experimental liberal arts program that connected the East and West inspired her to look into the middle. Her honors thesis investigates a pan-Eurasian elite phenomenon in the 4th century BCE through a comparison of the prestige goods exchange networks between the Greeks and Scythians in the northern Black Sea region and between the Qin 秦 and Rong 戎 in Northwest China.
She went on to complete the Regional Studies-East Asia Master of Arts program at Harvard University as a Harvard-Yenching scholar. Her master's thesis, titled "the origin of glass-making technology in China", explores the transmission and evolution of glassmaking in Inner and East Asia during the 1st millennium BCE through a statistical analysis of the composition data of ancient glass across Eurasia. Driven by her interest in the Silk Road, she conducted a proteomics project at the Warinner Lab, where she developed a method for the identification of silkworm species —distinguishing between Chinese and Indian origins — through protein mass spectrometry on silk fabrics.
At ISAW, she continues to research on Eurasian connectivity and archaeological science methods. As a member of the Uzbek-American Expedition in Bukhara project, she excavated a medieval cemetery and ancient settlements in the Inner City of Bukhara. She is currently analyzing the dental proteomics and metabolomics of the human remains from the cemetery, collaborating with labs at Harvard and NYU.
As an avid programmer and tech enthusiast, she always integrates digital technologies into her archaeological work. She has written a software for die analysis, as part of a Roman numismatics project that employs Machine Learning to perform rapid large-scale die analysis and uses Bayesian statistics to estimate the Roman mint output under Nero.
Her experience with various schools of archaeology across the world has also led to her interest in the theories and practice of archaeology and the history of the discipline. She has an upcoming contribution to the Oxford Handbook of the History and Practice of Chinese Archaeology that discusses the emergence of the conventional archaeological site report format in the People's Republic of China.
Research Interests:
- Eurasian Steppes and Central Asia
- Proteomics, metabolomics, genomics
- Material analysis
- Digital humanities
- History of archaeology