Graduate Students
Archaeology
My professional and research interests within archeology include Cultural Resource Management, Geographic Information Systems, predictive modeling, stone tool analysis, early agricultural societies and the domestication process in the archeological record.
Hunter-gatherers, technological organization and mobility, prehistory of Alaska and coastal adaptations in the Aleutian Islands, lithic analysis and sourcing.
Central Plains archaeology, zooarchaeology, taphonomy and site formation processes.
Sourcing studies, ceramic technology, experimental archaeology, digital archaeology, digital reconstructions, 3D modelling, landscape archaeology.
Great Plains archaeology, Mississippian archaeology, archaeological theory and method, archaeological philosophy, cognitive archaeology, iconography and symbolism, ceramic analysis, lithic technologies, museum curation, museum collections management, NAGPRA compliance and cultural affiliation.
Geoarchaeology, GIS, Quaternary Landscape Evolution, CRM, and Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.
Areas that are of interest to me include: human responses to new environments; arctic and subarctic archaeology; peopling of the Americas; Beringia; osseous technologies; migration and interaction; subsistence; museum curation and collections management; and public outreach and community engagement. I am advised by Dr. Sellet and am currently studying the chaîne opératoire of osseous industries in the Aleutian Islands. For 2017-2018, I am the graduate teaching assistant to Dr. Radovanović for Introduction to Archaeology and the Vice-President of Graduate Students for Anthropology.
Geoarchaeology, Quaternary Landscape Evolution, Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction, Landscape Archaeology and Predictive Modeling, Remote Sensing and GIS; Near Eastern and South Asian Archaeology (Focus: Afghanistan), Southeastern US Archaeology.
Biological Anthropology
Anthropological genetics, population genetics, genetic epidemiology
Human adaptation and variation, peopling of the New World, Denisovan and Neanderthal introgression, paleo-environmental reconstruction, ancient and modern genetics and epigenetics, genetic and epigenetic epidemiology, nutrigenetics, complex phenotypes, biological aging, gene-culture coevolution, fire culture in the Arctic, stem cells, natural history, and primatology.
Genetic Epidemiology, Anthropological Genetics, Paleopathology, Infections Disease, Epigenetics, Darwinian Medicine, and Evolution of Sex.
Evolutionary genetics, population genetics, ancient DNA analysis, environmental DNA.
Population genetics of Central Asia, morphological variation of modern humans, forensic applications, and psychiatric genetics (particularly ADHD)
I am a second year M.A. student in Biological Anthropology working as a Graduate Research Assistant for my advisor, Dr. Dennis O'Rourke. My research interests are human anthropological genetics and genomics, ancient and modern DNA, migration and population genetics, ecology and adaptation, human evolution and variation. I am also the President of the Graduate Students for Anthropology for the 2017-2018 academic year.
Anthropological genetics, human migration, and population genetics. Previous research includes forensic anthropology, morphoscopic traits, and the estimation of ancestry from the skull.
Sociocultural Anthropology
Body politics in postwar Guatemala, the reproduction of marginalization through neoliberal healthcare systems, the production of medical knowledge, the everyday ethics of caregiving & moral worlds of physicians, foreign aid decline in Latin America, development's side effects, and the Ch'orti' Maya area.
Ethnogenesis; extractive economies and indigenous political movements; ethnohistory of Amazonian peoples; infrastructure and ICTs (information and communication technologies); indigeneity; kinship; shamanism; memory; violence; Kandozi and Quechua (Inga/Southern Pastaza Quechua); western Amazonia (Peru/Ecuador).
Micronesia and the effects of globalization on local economies and customs, particularly hierarchical power dynamics in traditionally stratified societies.
Perceptions of health problems and suffering; Patient-Doctor relationships; Medical ethics; Social determinants of health; Slave health & nutrition practices; Health based geographic information systems; Health literacy and patient compliance; Demography of health and health care; Health and migration; Visual anthropology; East Africa and African-American communities.
Applied Ethics (Environmental Ethics, Medical Ethics), Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Ways of Knowing; Interdisciplinary intersections between law, science, ethics and anthropology.
Linguistic Anthropology
Currently conducting research on "light verbs" (what we call yardemchi pe 'il "helping verbs"). My primary focus is Uyghur verbs and grammatical topology, but I am also interested in culture.
I plan to use the corpus of pre-modern and modern Uyghur to research these questions for my PhD dissertation. Creating an electronic corpus will allow tracking the development of these helping verbs of 150 years. We will be able to count them and study their discourse context.
My research focus is on the rise of nationalism Xinjiang and the discursive creation of Uyghur ethnic identity. I am working on applying methods of linguistic anthropology to the analysis of power structure concealed in everyday discourse and the nationalistic manipulation of public sentiments by elites for the purpose of legitimizing power and hegemony.
Persian Language ideology and language identification of Iranian people; Role of idioms and proverbs on a nation’s identification: How Iranians express their identities, personalities and behaviors through using idioms and proverbs.
Languages and dialects of China, language contact, and language change over time. I speak Mandarin Chinese (New HSK Chinese Proficiency Exam Level 6, Highest Level) and am currently learning Uyghur.
