Dr. Lesley Harrington Joins the Department of Anthropology

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Lesley Harrington to the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Harrington, a skeletal biologist exploring questions centered around human growth and development, received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2010. Her doctoral thesis, nominated for the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award, examined postcranial biomechanics in juvenile huntergatherers from southern Africa. This was a bioarchaeological study that explored how the skeleton comes to reflect habitual behaviours that employed a unique approach through its basis in ethnographically informed hypotheses. Dr. Harrington was awarded a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in 2010 to work on a project supervised by Louise Humphrey at the Natural History Museum, London, U.K. Dr. Harrington's work continuing from that project aims to characterize dental development in Later Stone Age huntergatherers, whose populations are of small body size and possess unique morphological traits. This research is designed to explore both bioarchaeological and life history questions through study of dental tissues using microcomputed tomography and an innovative microscopy technique. Dr. Harrington will join us in July 2012.