FRIENDS OF BRIDGE LAB
Previous Members and Collaborators
DR. LEXI O'DONNELL
I received my Bachelor's degree in Anthropology in 2008 from the University of Arizona. Following my bachelor's degree, I worked in cultural resource management archaeology for a few years before arriving at the University of New Mexico. I received my MS in Evolutionary Anthropology in 2016 and my PhD in Archaeology in 2019. I am currently working in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. My overarching research goal is to understand the impacts of inequity and marginalization on group health. I seek to understand how inequality, marginalization, and movement impact the lived experience, how they are embodied, and how they are visible in the dead. I am also interested in heterogeneity in individual frailty and risks, as well as how the nature of skeletal assemblages (the Osteological Paradox) impacts our interpretations of health and stress in the dead. In my research, I use dental morphological and paleopathological data. While I often focus my research on people who lived in the AD 1000s - 1400s, I also work with recently deceased individuals, because of the insight that can be gained from them that can be applied to people from the past. I have two current research foci: migrations of past peoples of New Mexico and the etiology of cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis. In my research on cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis, I use contemporary postmortem computed tomography scans and medical information to better understand what conditions outside of anemia might cause these lesions to form.
DR. KEITH PRUFER
Keith M. Prufer is a Professor of Anthropology and a core faculty in the Center for Stable Isotopes at The University of New Mexico. His primary interests are in environmental archaeology, evolutionary ecology, and human decision making. His research focuses on how humans adapt to living in diverse landscapes and environments. From 2005–2015 he directed the Uxbenká Archaeological Project, an interdisciplinary study of human occupations in the Rio Blanco Valley of southern Belize. Though best known as the location of an important Classic Period polity, the valley has been continuously occupied since the Pleistocene until the present. Since 2014, Prufer has directed the Bladen Paleoindian and Archaic Archaeological Project, which is investigating the earliest humans in southern Mesoamerica and their long history of successful adaptations to the neotropics.
DR. ANNA RAUTMAN
I grew up in Albuquerque and finished my PhD in 2021. My research focuses on the tradeoffs between growth and development of the dental and skeletal systems. This research utilizes life history theory and applies it to the maturation of the soma. The sample is based on girls who’s health and radiographs are part of the Bolton-Brush Growth Study collection in Cleveland, Ohio. I am currently working at the Office of the Medical Investigator as a Forensic Anthropologist. Before that I was the Lab Manager for the Laboratory of Human Osteology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology.
Contact: arautman@unm.edu
HANNAH CANTRELL
I was an undergraduate at University of New Mexico majoring in Evolutionary Anthropology and minoring in Geography. I graduated in December 2022 and I started a PhD program at the University of Oregon in the fall of 2023 to study skeletal biology, global health, and evolutionary medicine. My senior paper, “The Root of the Problem: Dental Health Disparities in New Mexico”, investigates social predictors of dental health through decayed teeth, restorations, abscesses, and missing teeth as dental health status indicators. My McNair research, advised by a collaborator of Bridge Lab, Dr. Keith Prufer, studies developmental stress across the Maya agricultural transition in the Belize Paleoindian and Archaic Archaeology Project. My research interests include human and skeletal biology, evolutionary medicine and mismatch, dental anthropology, health disparities and social inequities, developmental origins of human health and disease, radiography, and biocultural approaches.
DR. EMILY MOES
My interests are broad within human biology, but specifically I focus on the mother-infant nexus and how we can infer that relationship in the bioarchaeological record. I am a dental anthropologist with an emphasis on deciduous teeth and their morphology and growth/development. My current research aims at combining these interests by studying fluctuating asymmetry in deciduous teeth and how it may reflect maternal stress. Since 2017, I have been involved with the Belize Paleoindian and Archaic Project as the bioarchaeologist under Dr. Keith Prufer, where I analyze human remains excavated from Belize. From 2017-2019, I led a team of students calling and interviewing next-of-kin of individuals who are included in the New Mexico Decedent Image Database, under Dr. Heather Edgar. I graduated from Boise State University with my Master’s degree in 2016 in anthropology. My previous field experience includes burial excavations at a medieval cemetery in Italy, and at two rock shelters in the Belizean jungle.
Contact: emilymoes@unm.edu
DR. CAIT MCPHERSON
Before joining the lab, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a PhD in biological anthropology and a minor in archaeology. I’m broadly interested in the relationship between developmental plasticity and the production of phenotypic variation, and my research explores aspects of Life History Theory (LHT), Developmental Systems Theory (DST) and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis. My dissertation examined the relationship between episodes of developmental stress and life history trade-offs involving growth and survival in an archaeological skeletal sample, using an interpretive framework based on the sensitive developmental windows concept. Advised by Drs. Heather Edgar and Lexi O’Donnell, I’m currently using data collected from the New Mexico Decedent Image Database to explore how early life stress relates to measures of developmental instability and constrained growth in a modern skeletal sample. Since 2015, I’ve conducted bioarchaeological field work in support of the La Playa Archaeological Project and the Arizona State Museum Bioarcheology Lab, and ethnographic field work for the National Park Service.
Contact: cmcpherson@salud.umn.edu