EDUCATION
Growing up in Baton Rouge (my
parents returned to their native Louisiana when I was
the ripe old age of 2 months), I attended both Baton
Rouge High School (graduating
1984) and Louisiana State University
(graduating magna cum laude1988). At LSU I
majored in anthropology, where I took more classes in archaeology than
in
biological/
physical anthropology or sociocultural anthropology. I even spent
a field
season doing
Mississippian archaeology in north-central
Ann Ramenofsky (then at LSU). However, biological anthropology,
especially human
paleontology, became a passion of mine. I was especially
interested in
studying
Neandertals and researching modern human origins, and after reading
much of the
work
of Prof. Erik Trinkaus (then at the
for graduate school. There I received broad training in
biological
anthropology and
paleolithic archaeology. In addition to working closely with Dr.
Trinkaus, I was also
fortunate enough to have taken classes from Lewis Binford, Lawrence
Straus,
Jeffrey
Long, Jeffery Froehlich, Jane Lancaster, and Hillard Kaplan. I
also took
three blocks of
Human Gross Anatomy (Extremities, Cavities, Head and Neck) at the UNM Medical
School in 1990-1991. This was an extremely important
component of my
training in that
it gave me the opportunity to teach Anatomy and Physiology laboratory
and
lecture
classes at both UNM and at Albuquerque
T-VI (now
Central New Mexico Community College)
from 1991-1996. I received an
M.A. in anthropology from UNM in 1991, and a Ph.D. in
anthropology in 1995. My thesis
was entitled “Body Size and Proportions in the Late
Pleistocene
In 1994-1995, I was a Visiting Instructor of Anthropology
in the
Department of Behavioral
Sciences at New Mexico Highlands
University
in Las Vegas, NM. In 1996, I left New Mexico
to accept a year appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor of
Anthropology
at the College
of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA (where I met my
wife!). In
1997, I moved to
Orlando, Florida, where I was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at
the University of
Central Florida for one year before coming to my current position
at Tulane
in 1998.