Robert N Spengler III is currently the director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. Prior to this, he has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World through New York University as well as at the German Institute of Archaeology at Freie Universität, Berlin. He defended his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis in March of 2013. He is studying the paleoeconomy and ecology of Central Asia from the third millennium B.C. onward and has ongoing research projects in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, China, and Mongolia. Dr. Spengler is the author of “Fruits of the Sands: How the Silk Road shaped your dinner table” (2017).