Affiliated Scientists

	Richard Leakey is Professor of Anthropology, Stony Brook University and Former Director of the Kenya National Museums and the Kenya Wildlife Service. Leakey's field work at Lake Natron on the Kenya-Tanzania Border, the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia, and on the East shore of Lake Turkana produced a treasure trove of hominid fossils that provides much of the record on which our understanding of human evolution is built. Although no longer active in fieldwork, Leakey, as one of the foremost authorities on wildlife and nature conservation, continues to educate others about the dangers of environmental degradation. To learn more, visit The Leakey Foundation and Leakey.com.
	Meave Leakey is Research Professor at Stony Brook University; Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic Society; co-director, Koobi Fora Research Project; and Research Associate, National Museums of Kenya. She has worked annually in the Turkana Basin since 1969. Current field research is focused on the time of emergence of Homo erectus. Meave Leakey impressed the world with her 1999 discovery of a 3.5 million-year-old skull and partial jaw believed to belong to new branch of early hominids. Dr. Leakey named the new genus Kenyanthropus platyops.
	Louise Leakey recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of London, and now heads the Koobi Fora Research Project. Along with mother Meave Leakey, she has precisely pinpointed regions within the 1200-square kilometre area of East Turkana that will most likely produce the answers to questions raised about this critical period in human evolution. She was part of the team that unearthed Kenyanthropus platyops, a new genus and species of human ancestor.
	John Fleagle is Distinguished Professor of Anatomical Sciences at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine. His research involves many aspects of evolutionary biology of higher primates, including laboratory studies of the comparative and functional anatomy of extant primates; field studies of the behavior and ecology of primates in Asia, South American, and Madagascar; and paleontological field research in Africa and South America. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976.
	Frederick Grine is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Stony Brook University and Program Organizer of the Human Evolution Workshop 2006. His research focuses on the reconstruction of early hominid dietary habits from the analysis of dental microwear, and the phylogenetic relationships among species of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo as deduced from fossil skulls and teeth. He received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of the Witwatersrand.
	Lawrence Martin is Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. Dr. Martin is a paleoprimatologist whose research focuses on the evolution of hominoid primates and the development, structure and thickness of dental enamel. He has conducted paleontological fieldwork at Miocene sites in Cameroon, Kenya, Pakistan and Turkey. His laboratory research on enamel structure involves the use of confocal microscopy, polarized light microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy.
	John Shea is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. His research interests include paleolithic archaeology and paleoanthropology of the Near East, Africa, and Europe; early hominin adaptive radiations; origin of modern humans; Neandertals; lithic technology; and experimental archaeology. He has a specific interest in stone tools and other primitive tools, and he teaches a course in Primitive Technology which examines the technological adaptations of hunter-gatherer societies and their consequences for biological and behavioral evolution.
	Mike Bell is a Professor in Stony Brook University's Department of Ecology and Evolution. He is interested in the causes of phenotypic variation in time and space. His research focuses on the evolutionary biology of the threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus), and he is interested in its genetics, development, natural selection, geographical variation, and paleontology. His paleontological research concerns fine-scale temporal variation in fossil stickleback from a diatomaceous shale deposit that formed in a Miocene lake in Nevada, USA.
	David J. Bernstein is Director of the Institute for Long Island Archaeology and Associate Professor in Stony Brook University's Department of Anthropology. He is an archaeologist with a research interest in New World prehistory. He has conducted archaeological investigations throughout northeastern North America, lower Central America, and the Caribbean. Much of his work focuses on past coastal societies. Areas of specialization include reconstruction of prehistoric subsistence systems, analysis of settlement seasonality, and study of stone tool technologies.
	Brigitte Demes is a Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. Her primary research interest is the interaction between function and form in the primate locomotor system, which she studies using methods of biomechanics and functional morphology. Much of her research is experimental in nature and conducted at the Stony Brook Primate Locomotion lab. She received her Ph.D. from Bochum University in 1982.
	Elisabeth Hildebrand is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. Research interests include early herding and plant cultivation in northeast Africa, and the interplay between subsistence strategies and social organization during prehistoric times. She has conducted two long-term projects in southwest Ethiopia: ethnoarchaeological research on plant domestication among the Sheko, and the first archaeological survey of the headwaters of the Omo River. She is currently doing excavation and paleoethnobotany in southwest Ethiopia and northern Sudan.
	Nathan Kley is Assistant Professor of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook. His research focuses on the functional morphology and evolution of the feeding apparatus in squamate reptiles, including studies of jaw morphology and feeding behavior in poorly known clades of basal snakes. Other related research has addressed the functional roles of the post-cranial musculoskeletal system during prey transport. More recent research interests have evolved toward broader and more highly quantitative studies of feeding performance and cranial morphometrics in snakes.
	Karen L. Kramer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. Her research centers on the comparative study of human demography, subsistence, and reproductive ecology among foragers and agriculturalists. Through a long-term field project in a traditional Maya village in the Yucatan, she addresses a variety of life history, demographic, and health questions. She received her Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Demography at UC Berkeley.
	David Krause is one of the world's most honored paleontologists. His work has appeared in virtually every scientific journal in his field as well as in general circulation publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, and USA Today. A Distinguished Professor in Stony Brook's Department of Anatomical Sciences, Dr. Krause has made numerous expeditions to Madagascar, where finds of dinosaurs, birds, crocodiles, and other fossils have ranked among the most important discoveries of the last 50 years.
	Susan Larson is a Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. Her research interests focus on the functional interpretation of musculoskeletal morphology of humans and nonhuman primates. Most of her work involves using laboratory methods to test hypothesized form/function relationships in order to more confidently reconstruct the behaviors of extinct primate species. She has recently been involved in the analysis of Homo floresiensis, the newly discovered diminutive hominids from the Island of Flores.
	Troy Rasbury is a member of the Department of Geosciences and the Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences at Stony Brook University. She is a carbonate petrologist and chronostratigrapher focused on U-Pb dating of syn-depositional carbonates from both the marine and terrestrial records. Rasbury’s research group has achieved two-sigma uncertainties in U-Pb ages of 1% or better using logically sampled commonly occurring syn-sedimentary carbonates.
	F. James Rohlf is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution of Stony Brook University.His research has focused on the development and critical analyses of mathematical and statistical methods used to solve problems in evolutionary biology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1962. He has authored more than 220 research publications and two of his books, Statistical Tables (1969) and Biometry (1969), written with Stony Brook colleague R.R. Sokal, remain standard teaching texts.
	James Rossie is an Assistant Professor in Stony Brook University's Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the evolutionary history of primates, particularly hominoids. Current research includes investigation of the development, homology, and phylogenetic significance of nasal and paranasal anatomy among primates; description and phylogenetic analysis of fossil hominoids and other catarrhines from East Africa; and development of methods for reconstructing phylogenetic history which incorporate morphological and paleobiogeographical data.
	Jack T. Stern is Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. He has worked primarily on the evolution of postcranial adaptations in primates, with emphasis on the origins of bipedalism. In collaboration with colleagues at Stony Brook, he has devoted the last 30 years to conducting telemetered electromyographic experiments on monkeys, apes, and humans in order to identify the functions of specific muscles and explain how structure has evolved to promote such functions.
	Erik Seiffert is Assistant Professor of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. He is a vertebrate paleontologist whose research is focused on the evolution, relationships, and adaptations of early African mammals, particularly Eocene-Oligocene anthropoid and strepsirrhine primates and members of the endemic African superorder Afrotheria. He has worked in Paleogene sites in Egypt and Ethiopia and plans to expand the search for Cretaceous and early Cenozoic mammals to the Turkana Basin.
	Elizabeth Stone, a Professor in Stony Brook University's Department of Anthropology, is a specialist in the archaeology of complex societies in the Near East. Her research has focused on issues ranging from the organization of households in ancient Mesopotamian cities, to the relationship between urban planning and underlying social and political organization in early complex societies. To this end she has directed archaeological field projects in Syria, Iraq, and now Turkey, in collaboration with Paul Zimansky.
	Katheryn Twiss, an Assistant Professor in Stony Brook University's Department of Anthropology, is an archaeologist specializing in the Neolithic of southwest Asia. Her research focuses on herding strategies and food practices in early agricultural society. As a zooarchaeologist, she uses faunal remains to study past human-animal interactions. She co-heads the faunal analysis team at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia.
	Zelalem Assefa is a post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (Archaeobiology and Human Origins Programs). His research interest focuses on the evolution and ecology of human subsistence behavior and the dynamics of human cognitive development. Assefa has participated in several field studies in different parts of Ethiopia: lower-Awash rift valley, lower Omo valley, and southeastern Ethiopia. He has served with the Ethiopian National Museum, and currently directs an exploratory field project in southeastern Ethiopia.
	Frank Brown, Dean of the University of Utah's College of Mines and Earth Sciences, is a key figure in African paleolithic archaeology. His analysis of the age and stratigraphy of deposits in Africa's Turkana Basin has made possible the dating of Kenyanthropus platyops and other hominid fossils from the area. His recent study of the Kibish, Ethiopia fossil site indicates the earliest known members of our species, Homo sapiens, roamed Africa about 195,000 years ago.
	Thure E. Cerling is Distinguished Professor of Geology & Geophysics and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Utah, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His research centers on the geological record of ecological change, including the isotope physiology and diets of modern mammals, as well as the history of diets of different mammalian lineages. He uses stable isotopes to understand the evolution of Earth's ancient climate, atmosphere and ecosystems. He also serves on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
	Tab Rasmussen is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis. His principal research interests center around the Early Tertiary mammals of Africa, with special focus on primates and hyracoids. He has participated in fieldwork in the Fayum, Egypt, and Chilga, Ethiopia, among other places. His published work includes contributions to anthropoid origins, early catarrhine paleobiology, hyracoid diversity and phylogeny, and faunal change in the African Eocene and Oligocene.