Student Awards and Accolades
Doctoral student Kamar Afra received a Forensic Sciences Foundation Emerging Forensic Scientist Award from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2020 for her paper “Craniometrics vs. Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP)s: Is There a Correlation?”
Doctoral student Armando Anzellini is one of six grantees to receive the Forensic Sciences Foundation (FSF) Lucas Grant for 2020-2021. Anzellini, working with his advisor Professor Dawnie Steadman, will conduct research titled: “Exploring intra-skeletal variation in stable isotope analysis through non-destructive approaches: Applications of the patterns of skeletal remodeling to forensic contexts.”
Hera Jay Brown, a 2018 UT graduate and anthropology major, has been named a 2020 Rhodes Scholar. A native of Corryton, Tennessee, she began study at the University of Oxford in England this fall. She plans to complete graduate work in migration studies there before pursuing a law degree in the United States. Brown is the first transgender woman to be elected to a Rhodes Scholarship, and the ninth current or former UT student to earn this prestigious honor.
Alexandra Emmons, a 2019 graduate of UT, received an Early Career Grant from the National Geographic Society for Reconstructing the Past: Using Paleo-Soils to Understand Paleoecological Changes from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic in 2019 along with Associate Professor Graciela Cabana.
Doctoral student Angela Mallard, supervised by Associate Professor Ben Auerbach, received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for her project “Assessing Multiple Lines of Evidence for Gene Flow in Archaeological Contexts.”
Clare Remy, a junior from Tucson, Arizona, majoring in anthropology with a minor in biology, was one of five recipients of at UT of a Goldwater Scholarship in 2020. The scholarships are awarded to outstanding college sophomores and juniors who are pursuing advanced study in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering. Remy’s research focuses on cystic fibrosis manifestations on the human skeleton informs her senior thesis on the Koch historical cemetery in Saint Louis, Missouri. Professors Amy Mundorff and Ben Auerbach are working with her on this project.
Doctoral student Rebecca Webster and Professor Barbara Heath received a 2020 grant from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Threatened Sites Fund. The grant funds archaeological work along the banks of Boathouse Pond on Virginia’s Northern Neck, an area threatened by significant erosion associated with geological subsidence and sea level rise. Webster was also the recipient of the Society for Bead Researchers’ Student Conference Travel Award in 2020. Her paper, “Peake, Wampum, or Sewant?: An Analysis of Shell Bead Terminology in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake,” was the runner-up in the Jamie Chad Brandon Student Paper Competition at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical and Underwater Archaeology in Boston. She also was awarded the Gloria S. King Fellowship in 2019 to study indigenous pottery and pipes at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.