Gouruyue (Gou) Yuan is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, specializing in paleoethnobotany. Her research focuses on the early domestication, dispersal, and diverse uses of plants beyond main crops across Central and Eastern Asia. Before coming to WashU, she earned a B.S. in Archaeology and Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied contact-period foodways in the Piedmont region of the southeastern United States by analyzing macrobotanical remains, and reconstructing social networks through various ceramic traits. She also works with R and Python for quantitative analysis, GIS, and 3D modeling, and is developing applications of artificial intelligence to automate pattern recognition in archaeological research.