About
I am currently under the mentorship of Dr. Anna Browne Ribeiro.
My research interests lay in bioarchaeology, paleoepidemiology, and biochemical approaches to paleopathological diagnosis. Currently in my last year of graduate studies at University of Louisville (UofL), I am conducting thesis research under the advisement of Dr. Anna Browne-Ribeiro. Additionally, I have developed mentorships with multiple faculty members in the Anthropology department throughout my graduate studies at UofL, notably Philip DiBlasi and Dr. Fabian Crespo. Travel and research grants awarded by my department have been fundamental in my professional and academic development throughout the program. These awards have allowed for travel to multiple professional conferences and participation in a paleopathology workshop at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For my master’s thesis, I used additional departmental grants to travel to New Haven, Connecticut for data collection. Over the course of 3 visits to CT, I sampled and analyzed 30 Indigenous Caribbean skeletons at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, to test for evidence of hemozoin, a biomarker for malaria. My last trip in August allowed me to introduce myself to Yale faculty, one of the top schools on my PhD application ‘hit-list’, and to perform microanalytical analysis of samples in the Chemical and Biophysical Instrumentation Center at Yale using Mass Spectrometry. Through collaborative efforts on behalf of the Yale University Malaria Project, this trip also involved working with specialists at University of Connecticut using Scanning Electron Microscopy and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. While preliminary, the results are promising, and I will be presenting them orally at the KAS conference this year, and via poster at an invitation-only malaria symposium at the 2018 American Association of Physical Anthropology conference in Austin, Texas.
I currently serve as President of the Anthropology Graduate Student Association and in previous semesters I held positions as the Anthropology department representative to the Graduate Student Council (GSC), and as a member of the Advocacy and Involvement Committee within GSC. My first fieldwork experience was under Dr. Jonathan Haws (University of Louisville) at a Middle Paleolithic cave site in Portugal. Beginning summer 2018, I will be conducting fieldwork in Italy under Dr. David Soren.
At the doctoral level, I want to focus more specifically on the processes of hemozoin formation, and investigate long term consequences of hemozoin sequestration in skeletal remains of infected individuals. I am interested in further identifying etiologies for some of the most frequently observed skeletal lesions, cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis, especially as they relate to the biochemical processes resulting from malaria-induced hemolytic and chronic anemia. Ultimately, my interests include refining methods for biomarker identification in ancient populations as a means to addressing dynamic paleo epidemiological questions asked by bioarchaeologists investigating ancient infectious and parasitic diseases.