Members of the Functional Morphology Lab racked up quite a few accomplishments this Fall!
Here's what happened:
Anna Zavodszky's (Spring 2019 FML graduate) manuscript based on her Senior Honors Thesis "Comparative and functional morphology of chevron bones in mammals" was accepted for publication. Congrats Anna!
The lab's current undergraduates Maya Bharatiya and Lydia Myers had an outstanding semester. Maya was selected as 1 of Stony Brook's 4 nominees for the Goldwater Scholarship - a very prestigious external award. We wish the best of luck to Maya in the interview process! Lydia, after participating in the NRP summer fieldwork, started her Seniors Honors Thesis on fossil finds from Napudet. Lydia received a Guiliano Global Fellowship to return to Nairobi to collect comparative data, as well as a SBU Department of Anthropology Undergraduate Research and Travel Award to support her work. Lydia's abstract on her research was accepted for presentation at the 2020 annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Congrats Maya and Lydia!
Graduate student Abigail Nishimura was awarded two grants : an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant. Abi continues to work on her dissertation project (also funded by the Leakey Foundation) that examines the functional morphology and macroevolution of the mammalian neck. Congrats Abi!
Finally, the FML piloted our new outreach activity at Riverhead Highschool. Their activity "What do biological anthropologists do?" introduced Ms. Monahan's class to the diverse careers occupied by biological anthropologists, including the work by primatologists and skeletal biologists.
