I am a biological anthropologist who studies hominin (human) evolution. My main research interests include the study of hominin taxonomy and phylogeny using cranial morphology, the application of geometric morphometrics to skeletal variation and the evolutionary history of Plio-Pleistocene Homo.   

I earned my Ph.D. in anthropology at the City University of New York (part of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology) in 2007 and am currently a Lecturer / Post-doc in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University.

Recent Projects 

  • Investigating the number of species represented by the current Homo erectus/ergaster fossil sample based on variation in cranial vault shape. Bootstrapping methods were used to compare the degree of variation in the fossil sample to extinct and extant primates (both human and non-human). Results were most consistent with a single species hypothesis.
  • Exploring intraspecific variation in the shape of the cranium in the Asian Homo erectus sample using 3D geometric morphometrics. I assessed the relative contributions of geography, time and size to cranial shape variation in the eastern portion of the Homo erectus hypodigm. While there is generally an Indonesian - Chinese (i.e., Zhoukoudian) shape dichotomy, Sangiran 2 (Indonesian) more closely resembles the Zhoukoudian specimens. There was no clear diachronic pattern of shape change within either Asian Homo erectus as a whole or within the Indonesian sample in particular.
  • In conjunction with Dr. Kieran McNulty (University of Minnesota), I examined the implications of static allometry for the shape of the LB 1 (Homo floresiensis) cranium, concluding that the shape of the cranium was consistent with expectation for a small archaic Homo individual based on allometry. 

 Current Projects

  • With colleagues I am exploring the relationship of cranial robusticity in modern humans to several external factors, including cranial size and shape, climate, neutral genetic distances and mastication.
  • With Dr. William Jungers (Stony Brook University), I am examining static allometry in extant and subfossil lemurs from Madagascar using 3D cranial shape data.