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.

Welcome New Post Docs

Tamar Shirinian received her PhD from Duke University in 2016 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Milsaps College before coming to UT. Shirinian’s research focuses on social movements and revolutions, environmental anthropology, feminist and queer anthropology, transnationalism, and psychological anthropology. Her current work examines diversity, inclusion, exclusion, and difference within the context of disasters and conflict, with a more recent focus on institutional logics. She looks at how ethnic, racial, and sexual differences affect access to mental health care and how the health care system is structured. Shirinian is working with Research Librarian Donna Braquet and others to collect, preserve, and share oral histories of LGBTQ+ people who live, or have lived, in East Tennessee.

Roger Begrich holds a PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Much of his ethnographic work has been conducted in India. He engages global concerns relating to medical and political anthropology, critical legal studies, and Indigenous/Native Studies. Begrich’s work combines an ethnographic analysis of the relations between indigeneity and sovereignty with a comparative discussion of substance use among marginalized populations. His work in India examines the effects of global racial capitalism and (internal) settler colonialism on tribal displacement. Begrich also researches global aging and the use of multiple medications among individuals in aging populations. He has begun research in India on how bodies and selves, as well as social relations, are increasingly mediated by pharmaceuticals and neoliberal forms of elderly care.

Simon Carrignon joined the department as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2019. He received his PhD in 2019 from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He specializes in building computer models that help us to understand how social interactions between individuals and groups can impact global changes. Carrignon has worked with archaeologists, historians, biologists, psychologists, and ecologists. He is currently working with Alex Bentley, professor of anthropology, on social interactions at the age of online social media. He is also working with Bentley and Nina Fefferman, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, on understanding how the spread of socially acquired behaviors can impact the spread of COVID-19. This work can also be used to explore the impact of viruses and other disease-causing agents on the evolution of ancient human societies at larger scales. While at UT, he has also been working outside of the department with epidemiologists and researchers in information science.

The Forensic Anthropology Center welcomed our new Haslam postdoctoral fellow, Charity Owings, who is a forensic entomologist. She earned a PhD in biology from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Owings is currently characterizing the insect biodiversity at the Anthropology Research Facility, and her overall research aims to refine time since death estimations using various arthropods. She grew up reading Professor Bass’s books and always dreamed of working at the body farm one day. Now that dream has come true, she could not be happier and more at home in the anthropology department.