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CHES PhD Alumnus Jay Reti (2013) was just named as the new Director of the Santa Cruz Island Reserve of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Santa Cruz Island is the largest island off the coast of California (about four times larger than Manhattan Island) with many endemic species of plans and animals. Jay will oversee all research on the island and develop conservation and education programs. His work on the island goes back to his High School days in California, but now, as an archaeologist, he sees many lines of research there that indulge his interests in lithic analysis and the development of statistical methods for assessing human reliance on technology. For example, he's studying how raw materials were transported and traded to determine economic patterns and relationships between different populations of Chumash Native Americans on the island.
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Two CHES Undergraduate Affiliates recently won awards for their Senior Honors Thesis research. The Department of Anthropology held its annual symposium showcasing undergraduate research for Senior Honors Theses today. Several of the students were CHES Undergraduate Affiliates. One of them, Sara Magee was 
awarded first prize for the poster presentation of her Honors Thesis research, “The Effects of Chewing Time on Gonial Morphology in the Mammalian Mandible.” The research was supervised by CHES faculty Dr. Susan Cachel, with CHES Associate Member Dr. Hylke de Jong as second committee reader (CHES Graduate Affiliate Fred Foster and CHES Alumnus Shauhin Alavi were also co-authors on Sara’s poster). Tanner Yuhas won the 2019 Robert Locandro Award for the Outstanding Student in Natural Resources, in part for his research, "Understanding Dietary Divergence in Wild Bornean Orangutans: The Role of Kinship," which was supervised by CHES faculty Dr. Erin Vogel, with CHES Faculty Ryne Palombit as second reader.
Congratulations Sara and Tanner!
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The final talk in the CHES Lecture Series for this academic year was today by archaeologist Yotam Asscher of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Dr. Asscher discussed the challenges of rescue excavations in Israel. He described in fascinating detail how mobile laboratories and portable instruments working in places like Caesarea provide crucial information fast, which is invaluable for the success of these rescue efforts and thereby contributing significantly to our understanding of the history of region.
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Anthropologist Brian Wood (University of California, Los Angeles) spoke today on sex differences in space use and spatial cognition among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Dr. Wood has been studying the Hadza for well over a decade, during which he has amassed a large array of data, some of which he shared today. Among the Hadza, both men and women contribute to the group's daily food intake: women collect approximately 4-6 kg of food each today, primarily in the form of underground tubers, whereas men focus on hunting ungulates, the carcasses of which are brought back to settlements. Dr. Wood also conducted a series of experiments carefully designed in light of cultural practices of the 
Hadza, the results of which suggest that men score significantly better on navigation and mental rotation tests. Dr. Wood interprets these experimental results in light of the different foraging strategies of men and women, which tend to produce much longer and much more circuitous travel paths for men, as revealed by individual GPS units worn by individuals each day. Men also spend significantly more of their foraging time alone, compared to women who are in small groups throughout the gathering period. A lively discussion followed the fascinating lecture.
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Last night's "Featured Research" Evening highlighted the research CHES Graduate Affiliate Fred Foster is doing on the microstructure and mechanical behavior of primate tooth enamel. Fred is applying methods from material science engineering to look inside the teeth of extant primates and link fine details of dental structure to functional (adaptive) properties that help teeth resist failure or damage when chewing challenging foods. The research will shed much light on dietary ecology in primates, but ultimately Fred will carry the insights he gains to the hominin fossil record, where he will address and resolve questions about the evolution of teeth and diets of extinct hominins.
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At last week's annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Cleveland, Ohio, CHES Graduate Affiliate Will Aguado was awarded the Sherwood Washburn Prize for best podium presentation by a student. His lecture was entitled "Effective seed dispersal of an economically important plant resource by western chimpanzees at Fongoli, Senegal”.
Congratulations, Will!
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CHES Graduate Affiliate Melanie Fenton was just awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation to support his research "Contextual and physiological correlates of complex behavioral strategies in primates." Melanie's research investigates aspects of the "third mechanism" added to Darwin's sexual selection theory: sexual conflict. She's currently in the field collecting behavioral and hormonal data on wild olive baboons to test hypotheses about how females respond to coercive versus friendly interactions with males, and ultimately how these interactions affect mating success. Olive baboons are especially useful subjects for such a study because the nature of social relationships between males and females varies tremendously compared to other primates, from close, affiliative bonds to aversive, antagonistic relations.
The broader impacts of Melanie's research include undergraduate laboratory training here at Rutgers as well as a major project promoting education of Kenyan school children about conservation and human-wildlife conflict in their country and globally. Working with a Kenyan scientist and local conservation organizations, Melanie will be regularly visiting several primary schools in Kenya over the course of her 18-month study, doing exercises with the students and assessing their effectiveness in achieving the educational goals she has set.
As a recipient of the CHES Albert Fellows Dissertation Research Award, further details of Melanie's study can be found here.
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CHES Graduate Affiliate Fred Foster was recently awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation to support his research "Microstructure and mechanical properties of primate dental enamel." Fred is using methods from material science engineering to study the adaptations in teeth that help them perform and resist failure over lifetimes, which are relatively long in the nonhuman primates.
The broader impacts of Fred’s project will contribute to advancing and developing biomedical engineering, one of the fastest growing job markets in the country. For example, Fred’s work will improve the curriculum in Biomedical Engineering program here at Rutgers, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, partly by developing a laboratory component that emphasizes the value of understanding the mechanical properties of teeth in biomedical engineering applications.
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Dr. Ashley Hammond, who recently was appointed Curator of Biological Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, gave a lecture today on the evolution of bipedalism and hip anatomy in humans past and present. Dr. Hammond's research takes her to a number of fossil sites in East Africa, where she and her team are unearthing the remains of human ancestors as well as extinct apes of the Miocene epoch (23 - 5 million years ago). She is also pursuing extremely detailed analyses of hip anatomy using museum specimens. As she made clear in a fascinating lecture, Dr. Hammond's research is shedding much light on that initial innovation that in a sense launched the human lineage about 6 million years ago: walking on two legs.
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Erin Vogel recently received the Robert W. Sussman Award for Scientific Contributions to Anthropology. Congratulations to Erin!