Michael McCormick, faculty member at Harvard University, will be speaking about the use of science in regards to the history of humans on Monday.

McCormick’s lecture “Studying the fall of the Roman Empire with the Science of the Human Past” will take place at 7 p.m. in the Memorial Union Sun Room.

Currently, McCormick has multiple roles at Harvard University. He is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval history as well as the director in Cambridge of the Max Planck Harvard Research Center for the Arachaescience of the Ancient Mediterranean, according to the Lectures program website.

Additionally, McCormick is the founding chair of the Harvard Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

According to their website, the initiative is a “supra-departmental, cross-divisional and inter-school network that brings historians and archaeologists together with other scholars and scientists to chart bold new answers to the age-old question: what is history?”

This initiative allows historians, archaeologists, scientists and scholars to work together to study the human past with tools from modern day. These technologies include DNA analysis and the use of a digital atlas to help find new breakthroughs when it comes to human history, according to the lecture program’s website.

Before Harvard, McCormick was a faculty member of the history department at John Hopkins University.

The lecture is cosponsored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, among many departments across campus including Classical Studies, Economics, History, and more, along with the University Library, the committee on lectures, funded by Student Government.