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.
Plains Cultures, Landscape Utilization, Landscapes of Movement, Paleo-to-Archaic Transition, Historic Cellars, Pedestrian to Horse transition in the Protohistoric period.
Sourcing studies, ceramic technology, experimental archaeology, digital archaeology, digital reconstructions, 3D modelling, landscape archaeology.
Geoarchaeology, Paleoenvironmental reconstruction, paleoclimate, soils and museums.
Archaeological implications of adapting to rapid climatic shifts. I will be conducting an ethnoarchaeological investigation of how the Deg Hit'an people of west-central Alaska are adapting to modern climate change, and the archaeological implications of such adaptations.
Geoarchaeology, GIS, Quaternary Landscape Evolution, CRM, and Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.
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
Anthropological genetics, ancient DNA, epigenetics, population genetics, archaic introgression, human adaptation, human migration, human physiology, bioethics, biological aging, stem cell biology, epidemiology, Siberia, Beringia, and the Americas.
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.
Ancient DNA, Anthropological Genetics, Molecular Genetics, Genomics and Sequencing, Infectious Diseases, Human Migration, Peopling of the Americas, Osteology, and Forensic Anthropology.
Sociocultural Anthropology
Economic anthropology of Xinjiang, China. Influence of industrialization on subsistence societies. Changes in the mode of production and social organization, transformation of cultures and values. Financialization and consumerism, construction of identities through consumption.
Indigenous peoples' rights, migration, Latin America
The relationship between the military and the discipline of anthropology by comparing each group’s conceptualization of ethics to reveal overlap and identify areas for potential cooperation, peacemaking and how ideas like religion and history influence peace processes.
Historical anthropology; the mutuality between organization of sociality and construction of space; kinship, ethnicity and rituals on the landscape in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands; changes in human-environment relations under the development policy for ethnic minorities in Southwest China; cultural transformation and continuity of the Pumi speaking people (Pumizu/Premi/Prmi) in Yunnan and Sichuan, China.
Human-environment interactions, non-renewable resources, socio-politics, economics
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.
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.
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.
