McCormick says he intends to use science’s new understanding of DNA and genomes to determine how health and disease impacted people’s lives throughout the medieval period.

“Human health is a fundamental part of human history and offers a huge window on culture,” he says.

Not too unlike the movie “Jurassic Park,” McCormick hopes to use DNA, which may survive in fragmented form in the remains of both people and animals, to determine what organisms might have had an impact of people’s health, he said.

McCormick is analyzing Roman skulls with a team at the medical school to identify the cause of the great 6th- century plague which, according to some, precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.

“We’re trying to see if we can turn up any traces of the genomes of people buried in mass graves at this time,” he says.

McCormick seems to find historical evidence in the unlikeliest of places.

For example, according to Hankins, McCormick and others have recently sought to determine how many meters the black rat, Ratus ratus—supposedly the main agent of the plague—could travel in a year. It turns out the rat can travel 200 meters a year, which suggests that the rat had to have been ship-born for the plague to have spread as fast as it did, according to Hankins.

McCormick has also studied tree owls that eat rats in Sardinia, Hankins says.

Scientists, McCormick says, are making strides towards identifying the diets of both people and animals from their bones or teeth.

According to Hankins, McCormick is currently in negotiations with the Egyptian government over second-hand mummies. Hankins added that his friend hopes to use information gleaned from these mummies to determine early settlement patterns and the ethnic make-up of Europe. “The marriage between health and history is something that has been occasionally attempted...but [McCormick] seems to be doing it really, really, really well,” Hankins says.

Yet another project McCormick will soon begin will take him to France, where scientists are going to test between 15 and 20 coins of Charlemagne to try to determine the origins of silver and possibly reveal something about the European economy based on the movement of coins.

But McCormick’s plans don’t stop there.

McCormick began this year by organizing a “test balloon of a workshop” on computational philology—the science of texts—which brought together experts in artificial intelligence, classicists and computer scientists to create software that would help historians identify and determine the origin of documents based on language, he says.

“That’s one of the things I want to do with the Mellon money,” he says, “to bring together people who would never get together.”

McCormick intends to apply the software he hopes will emerge out of this group effort to the approximately 14,000 primary sources on the Latin lives of saints, nearly 8,000 of which are completely unidentified, he says. “Historians have to know where and when [a document] comes from,” he says. “I thought that if we could give people some way of sorting through these 8,000 documents—even to say that it was written before 1,000—[that] would be fantastic.”