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Was there ever a time you looked like a stereotypical scientist—nerd with glasses—or have you always been the bombshell Egyptologist we know now?
I am such a nerd. You guys. And it’s funny. These pictures that are online for Discovery Channel, some friends were just giving me a hard time and saying, “Who’s that?” because I don’t wear makeup in my day-to-day life, and I like to wear jeans and T-shirts all the time.

No, I’m quite the nerd, and I do own glasses as well. I just try to wear contacts as much as possible.

I think part of the thing that intrigues people about me is that I happen to be a woman who is six feet tall, and I think that makes my physical presence more of an interest to people. But my whole life, I’ve been a nerd. Who likes to study for eight hours a day? Nobody. But I love to read. I love to – you know, my vacations, I go off and think, oh, we should do a TV show about this.

And I start working, so I connect my passion for the ancient world with work, and that's how Out of Egypt, as a series, as a show, was created. My husband and I do a lot of traveling, and we watch TV and look at how people relate with the ancient world. And we decided to put the two together and really make it work. We’re very nerdy about our approach to the show. And we want it to be cool and different, but we want it to be right. I’m a teacher at heart, so I’m still – I still grade my students’ exams. I’m still a hard teacher, so yes, I’m still a nerd. Absolutely. Never change.

Your morbid curiosity is astonishing, tell us what legacy you want to leave behind, when you finally retire?
I was just talking to a student today, encouraging him to finish his dissertation soon, soon, soon. And I said, 'we’re like fashion models.' Academics are like fashion models. We only have 20 years to actually make a mark, a very short time because the preparation is so grueling and time consuming. You actually only become a participating, fully-fledged academic after about ten years of preparation. Then you get a job by the time you’re 36, 37, 38, and then you have to retire by the time you’re 65, so we’ve got 25 years of time?

If I can leave the legacy of being an academic who produced serious research for my peers, and yet, at the same time, communicated with passion and excitement how amazing the ancient world is, and history, and learning about history is, then I’ve been able to walk that line between the Ivory Tower of academia, and the teacher that’s communicating to the world.

If you weren’t busy raiding tombs today, what other profession would you have been busy with?
I like health and nutrition. Everything seems to revolve around the body with me. I’m very interested in what we eat, in being healthy, and making sure you get omega-3 fatty acids and getting the right nutrients and supplements and, I don’t know. Maybe I would have been a doctor. I’m not sure. But I’m very interested in diseases and diagnoses and health issues. That interests me quite a bit.

Will you be raiding the tombs here in Asia in the near future as well?
I want to go to Asia very, very much. We tried to go to China on this last trip, but it was hard to get permission to talk about the dead in China, so we actually went to other places instead. We tried to go to India, but it was hard. We had other problems there as well, so I definitely want to go back to Sri Lanka, which we loved. I want to definitely go to China. I would love to go to the Philippines to see how – you have all of these different connections between European, Asian, and island culture, and I want to see how that plays out on the ground. I’m very interested in that.

Discovery Channel’s Out of Egypt is a show hosted by Dr. Kara Cooney, and is about how secret societies, ritual sacrifices and burial practices link ancient civilizations together. It premieres on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 9 PM with encores on the following Monday, 3 AM, Wednesday at 2 PM, Saturday at 8 PM, and Sunday at 6 AM and 4 PM.