Spotlight Spring 2025

Undergraduate Spotlight Spring 2025

Renee Kuban — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:57:31 +0000

Undergraduate Spotlight Spring 2025 Renee Kuban Tue, 03/18/2025 - 11:57

Mia Chaw (BA Anthropology in Progress)

Mia Chaw is a senior majoring in Anthropology and MCDB. She does ancient DNA and bioinformatics work in Dr. Fernando Villanea's lab. She is focused on the role of archaic introgressed (mostly Neanderthal or Denisovan) DNA in a dataset of ancient genomes from the Americas. She studies these ancient individuals because Indigenous American and Latino populations are underrepresented in genomics research and because Indigenous Americans alive today often have European or African DNA resultant from European colonialism. She is looking for introgressed haplotypes, alleles, and functional candidate regions to learn how Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA may have assisted the peopling of the Americas.

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Alumni Spotlight Spring 2025

Renee Kuban — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:56:05 +0000

Alumni Spotlight Spring 2025 Renee Kuban Tue, 03/18/2025 - 11:56

Christopher Keller Morris (Anthropology, PhD 2014)

Dr. Morris is an assistant professor of anthropology at George Mason University. A sociocultural anthropologist focused on Southern Africa, his research examines environmental governance, pharmaceutical politics, and post/colonial histories using ethnographic and historical methods. He has collaborated with advocacy groups on land rights activism and resource policies in South Africa. His book, Biotraffic: Medicines and Environmental Governance in the Afterlives of Apartheid (UC Press, 2024), explores how former apartheid “homelands” have become sites where international drug profits intersect with contests over land, extractive jurisdictions, and political power. He has published in American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology Now, and other journals.

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Graduate Student Spotlight Spring 2025

Renee Kuban — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:54:58 +0000

Graduate Student Spotlight Spring 2025 Renee Kuban Tue, 03/18/2025 - 11:54

Annabelle Lewis (Archaeology, PhD Candidate)

Annabelle researches the production, consumption, and display of mortuary goods in 19th century rural communities. During her time at CU, she has worked on sites in New York state and Colorado; she combines geospatial and archaeological methods to understand trends in deathcare and mortuary behaviors. She is particularly interested in how the Industrial Revolution and intensification of extractive practices, like farming and mining, changed the ways in which past people thought about their gender, class, and ethnic identities, and how these cultural shifts can be seen archaeologically through cemetery sites.

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Faculty Spotlight Spring 2025

Renee Kuban — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:52:53 +0000

Faculty Spotlight Spring 2025 Renee Kuban Tue, 03/18/2025 - 11:52

Fernando Villanea (Biological Anthropology)

"I study the Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry that lives in our genomes, the consequence of our ancestors admixing with these two archaic populations over 40,000 years ago. That archaic ancestry is a window to the past: I use it to learn about Neanderthals and Denisovans life histories and evolution. That same archaic ancestry has functional and medical consequences that may affect our daily lives. I am particularly interested in how the archaic ancestry of the founding Indigenous populations of America helped them adapt to new environments, and how those genome variants affect the lives of their descendant populations. I do this through a combination of population genetics theory, computational biology, and observations of natural history, some of it based on the fossil record."

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