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Dr. Moniruzzaman appointed as WHO Task Force Member
As previously reported here, Dr. Monir Moniruzzaman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University has been appointed as a member of the inaugural Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues at the World Health Organization (WHO). This Task Force was established by the Member States at the 70th World Health Assembly in 2017 to advise and assist the WHO and other Member States, in disseminating and implementing the WHO Guiding Principles. These guiding principles address the ethical aspects of organ transplantation such as the voluntary and unpaid donation of human tissues and organs, issues of universal…
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Adjunct Faculty, Dr. Amanda Tickner
Dr. Amanda Tickner is a librarian specializing in GIS in the Maps Library and an Adjunct lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. Amanda helps people find data, use GIS in research, teach GIS to beginners, and troubleshoot GIS problems, she also sits on several PhD committees in Anthropology. The interdisciplinary quality of her GIS work allows her to help people from all disciplines, which dovetails well with her anthropological background. Dr. Tickner received her PhD in archaeological paleobotany from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2009 and began at MSU in 2015. Currently, Dr. Tickner is transitioning…
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Great Lakes Digital Cultural Heritage
Dr. Heather Howard, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Affiliated Faculty of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program and the Native American Institute here at MSU, was awarded a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada as co-Principal Investigator with Principal Investigator Heidi Bohaker (History, University of Toronto) and co-Principal Investigator Margaret Bruchac (Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania). Their project, “Widening the Circle: Building a Community Knowledge Sharing Digital Platform with Great Lakes Indigenous Cultural Heritage Research Data,” will provide just over $40,000.00 to create and test a new public website for the Great Lakes Research Alliance…
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Alumna, Dr. Megan McCullen
We are very proud to announce that our alumna, Dr. Megan McCullen, is the new Director of the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology & Planetarium at Wayne State University. Dr. McCullen’s position was created as a full-time position in 2017 by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Wayne State. Prior to this, a faculty member in the Anthropology Department was the Museum Director in addition to their regular faculty duties, and the Planetarium had a similar set up within the Physics Department. The goal of creating a new position was to have a person who can take…
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Dr. Hefner and NIJ Helping to Identify Children
Dr. Joseph T. Hefner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University, and Dr. Nicholas Herrmann, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University, received a National Institute of Justice award to improve the accuracy of age estimates for unidentified remains of children and adolescents. The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio and Triservice Orthodontic Residency Program, 59th Dental Group will also collaborate on this research. The project entitled, “Investigation of subadult dental age-at-death estimation using transitional analysis and machine learning methods,” was funded for approximately $900,000 and focuses on tooth root and…
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Alumni & Friends of Archaeology Research Award
The Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Expendable Fund, established to enhance research and learning of undergraduate and graduate students in the archaeology program through the MSU Department of Anthropology, awarded Jeff Painter funds for his dissertation research during the Summer of 2018. This was the second year for the Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Research Enhancement Award and Jeff was able to complete two trips to the Dickson Mounds Museum in west-central Illinois in order to gather data for his dissertation. Mr. Painter’s proposed dissertation seeks to better understand the role of cooking and foodways within social interaction by examining…
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New Research on the Peopling of the Americas
An international research crew, including MSU Department of Anthropology Assistant Professor Kurt Rademaker and five team members, contributed some of the key ancient human remains that documented population dynamics in the Andean region. The results of this research were revealed in a recent article, “Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America,” published in the journal Cell Vol.175(5). In 2015, Dr. Rademaker’s team excavated several ancient individuals from Cuncaicha rockshelter, in the high-elevation Peruvian Andes. Dr. Rademaker hand-carried the three rare, ancient individuals which included a 9000-year-old female and two males dating from 4200 and 3300 years ago…
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Featured Faculty, Dr. Lucero Radonic
Dr. Lucero Radonic, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, joined the department in 2014. Her research centers around the human/environment interaction within urban landscapes. More specifically, the human governance of changing landscapes, the ways nature is transformed for human use and how we make decisions about the distribution of natural resources within dynamic, urban environments. In Arizona, where she grew up, water has always fascinated her and was ever present in conversations. Her fondness for the desert environment lead her to pursue her BS in environmental sciences in 2005 from the University of Texas El Paso. It was during her early studies…
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Featured Graduate Student, Autumn Painter
Autumn Painter, a graduate student here in the Department of Anthropology, specializing in archaeology was provided the opportunity to travel with Dr. Marcy O’Neil, an anthropology alumna and grant support staff and former instructor in the department, to Benin, West Africa during the summer of 2018. In collaboration with the Department of Anthropology and the African Studies Center, both here at MSU, Ms. Painter and Dr. O’Neil celebrated the launch of the second volume of a project called Books That Bind at the US Embassy in Cotonou. Autumn became a part of this project during her assistantship in Lab for…
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Message from the Chair: Dr. Jodie O’Gorman
At this time of the semester, when we stop to take stock of what we’ve done over the past year, I’m always inspired and astounded at the breadth and scope of the research done by our graduate students, faculty, and undergraduates in the Department of Anthropology. We have many examples of faculty mentors publishing with their students, including Dr. Tetreault and graduate student Sarah Tahir who co-authored with two physicians an article appearing in the Journal of Muslim Mental Health based upon research conducted after the 2016 election on American Muslim women’s responses to rising Islamophobia. Dr. Hefner mentored his…