2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
2009
Asher Rosinger (U Georgia)
A medical anthropologist interested in people-environment health connections, economic decision making and heuristics, and water issues. He is currently studying the impacts of water on childhood health in Bolivia.
Megan Solon (Indiana U)
A linguistic anthropology student interested in language endangerment, language shift, bilingualism, language contact and language policy and planning, Megan plans to work with one or more indigenous languages of South America
Mercedes Ward (Utah)
Mercedes Ward is an anthropology student who utilizes methods and approaches from psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary ecology. As a Fulbright Grantee, she will conduct dissertation field research on the cognitive determinants of natural resource use among Miskitu hunter-horticulturalists in Nicaragua.
Alejandro Feged (Stanford)
Anthropologist interested in evolutionary theory, infectious disease,
and environmental change. He currently explores the effect of habitat
transformation and other cultural practices on malaria outbreaks in
the Amazon.
Nicholas Q. Emlen (U Michigan)
A linguistic anthropologist who studies Quechua and the linguistic relationship between the Central Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands. He is particularly interested in the conflicts and cooperation arising from highland settlement in and around the territories of indigenous Amazonian people.
Kristen Munnelly (U Michigan)
Description pending
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2008
Kathryn (Katie) Demps
(UC Davis)
An anthropologist who studies the evolution of human behavior using cultural evolution theory and human behavioral ecology. Her dissertation examines optimal learning strategies and the acquisition of traditional knowledge. I work with a small scale society in south India living primarily in forest preserves.
Gayatri Thampy (Ohio State University)
An economic anthropologist interested in resource rights, particularly land tenure reforms and household economics. She is currently studying household decision making processes in the context of land reforms in Panama.
Ruth Magtanong (Case Western Reserve University)
Ruth is a student of medical anthropology and public health with a focus on infectious diseases and infection control/prevention strategies from an evolutionary perspective. She is interested in host-pathogen interactions, stress responses, and physiological variation across the life course in polyparasitism.
Victoria Constanza Ramenzoni (University of Georgia)
As a an evolutionary and cultural anthropologist, Victoria is interested in exploring the interactions between behavioral ecology and cognition. She has conducted experimental studies in human cognition (probabilistic and analogical inferences) in Argentina and is planning to carry out cross-cultural research in Madagascar in covariation and climate estimation. She is also committed to study nutritional and subsistence changes associated to processes of market integration.
Eric Kightley
Eric Kightley is a student of cultural anthropology with a focus on medical anthropology. His research interests include the development of methods to measure knowledge and the interaction between traditional ecological knowledge and health.
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2007
Dan Eisenberg (Northwestern)
A bio-cultural anthropologist, Dr. Eisenberg is interested in health from an evolutionary perspective, behavioral variation, and host-pathogen interactions. He has published on the biological basis of impulsivity and, on the applied front, is interested in behavioral changes to reduce parasitic infections from drinking contaminated water.
Cynthia Grace (South Florida)
Initially trained as a psychologist, Dr. Grace is interested in using anthropological theory and methods to inform policies for the management of fisheries. In particular, she wants to show how local or indigenous knowledge can be used in parallel with the more standard types of research to create more effective fishery management plans.
Nemer Narchi (Georgia)
Initially trained as an oceonographer, Dr. Narchi is interested in traditional environmental knowledge of marine life, comparing similarities and differences between traditional knowledge of plants and marine organisms, and identifying the reasons why some marine organisms are selected as medicines.
Soroush Parsa (UC-Davis)
Trained as a biologist in methods of integrated pest management, Dr. Parsa is interested in the adoption of new farm technologies and management practices in relation to the social status and other attributes of the both the adopter and the supplier of information. He has worked on potato disease management in Peru and intends to return there for his PhD.
Aeleka Shortman (Kentucky)
Dr. Shortman Is interested in subsistence strategies, agriculture, and food exchange, includi8ng study of large-scale commodity chains and the social aspects of local-level food distribution networks.
Ariela Zycherman (Columbia Teachers College)
Dr. Zycherman Is interested in food security, and how cultural conceptions of food security and a proper diet influences food vulnerability and the new foods they decide to consume or adopt in their farms. She plans to do a pilot test of her dissertation work among the Tsimane’ during the summer of 2008.
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2006
James Broesch (Emory)
A former zoologist, Dr. Broesch studied social learning and transmission of cultural traditions among white-faced capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica.
He is interested in how traditional or local cultural knowledge of the environment is transmitted within and across generations, and how knowledge might shape
people’s interaction with the environment.
Andrew Gerkey (Rutgers)
Dr. Gerkey Is interested in collective action and cooperative subsistence activities among herders and salmon fishermen in Eastern Russia. For the study, he plans to explore the role of income inequality and kinship as possible determinants of cooperative activities, and the effect of the market reforms on collective action.
María Ruth Martínez-Rodríguez (Georgia)
Dr. Martínez-Rodríguez studied agricultural sciences in her native Costa Rica. At the University of Georgia she is interested in testing hypotheses about the acquisition of ethnobotanical knowledge among children. She has done fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.
Kristine Skarbo (Georgia)
Dr. Skarbo studied ecology, agriculture, and development before coming to Georgia, where she focuses on the links between agricultural diversity and traditional local knowledge, including public policies for promoting the preservation of agricultural diversity. She has done fieldwork in Uganda and Ecuador.
Teressa Trusty (Washington)
Dr. Trusty has a background in earth and computer sciences and now focuses on environmental anthropology, particularly the role of
cultural values on people’s use of natural resources. Her dissertation focuses on conservation and development in the
Madidi park, Bolivia, where she plans to use visual techniques to estimate the role of values in conservation.
Melanie Vento (Northwestern)
A bio-cultural anthropologist, Dr. Vento is interested in how culture might affect immune functions and the links between bio-markers and weight gain,
particularly in non-Western societies.
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2005
Lisa Chaudhari (Georgia)
Dr. Chaudhari was interested in ethno-ecology and went to Georgia to study with E. and B. Berlin. She had finished her first year of graduate school when she came to Bolivia. She was interested in the protective role of gardening on health among immigrants in the USA.
Randall Hicks (Michigan)
Dr. Hicks was already doing fieldwork among Bolivian immigrants in Argentina when he applied because he wanted to use formal methods to study discourse.
Colleen Nyberg (Northwestern)
Dr. Nyberg came with an MA in anthropology and was interested in the links between sociability and child health. She developed and pilot-tested methods to collect data on the quality of social interactions and measures of health.
Tom Recht (U-Pennsylvania)
Dr. Recht trained as a linguist, Recht had finished his first year of graduate work, and showed interest in doing work in the Amazon on the effects of market exposure on the use of smell to classify plants. During the summer with us he developed a test to explore the topic, which he applied to villagers in Yaranda.
Emily Yates (New York University)
Dr. Yates trained as an anthropologist at Stanford, she came to Bolivia after finishing her first year at NYU interested in how cultural norms affects perceptions of body image, and how perceptions of body image affect health. She developed questions to gauge the topic and applied them in the two training villages.
She has applied for an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
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2004
Jeremy Brooks (UC-Davis)
A former biology major, Dr. Brooks was interested in how religious values affect the use of natural resources. After finishing his training with TAPS, he returned to Davis, passed his Ph.D. exam, and won an NSF doctoral improvement grant to study religious values and conservation in Bhutan.
Allan Gillispie (Texas A & M University)
Dr. Gillispie was interested in human capital among foragers.
After finishing the training with TAPS and passing his Ph.D. exams,
he joined a study by H. Kaplan (New Mexico) and M. Gurven (UC-Santa Barbara) financed by NIH and NSF on aging among the Tsimane’. He will use data from that project for his Ph.D.
Elizabeth Olson (Case Western)
Dr. Olson was interested on the choice of birth practice (e.g., mid-wife v hospital)
among the Tsimane’.
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