91ÖÆƬ³§

Jennifer has been a lecturer in biological anthropology at 91ÖÆƬ³§ since Fall of 2025. Her research focus is on human health in the past…as well as the present. Her work has centered on paleopathology, paleoepidemiology, and bioarchaeology. She holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation research examined how infectious diseases (specifically zoonotic diseases) impacted human health, society, and medical practices in ancient Mesopotamia and the Near East. She took an interdisciplinary approach by examining human skeletal remains, ancient DNA of pathogens, and cuneiform medical texts She is interested particularly in how factors such as age, sex, gender, diet, stress, migration, trade, and other environmental and social systems affected the transmission, distribution, and severity of infectious diseases globally in the past. Her current project, an extension of her dissertation research on a more global scale, is focused on how infectious diseases and dietary practices, in Taiwan in the 5th – 10th century CE affected the nature and distributions of disease states. Most especially infectious diseases, and how they were transmitted on a large, geographical scale. Taiwan was a central hub of the Maritime Silk Road This trade route linked Taiwan with China, mainland South East Asia, India, and Mesopotamia, places where infectious diseases like tuberculosis, treponemal diseases, and leprosy were well established. Jennifer is also passionate regarding the ethics of working with human skeletal remains. Many of the collections housed in museums and teaching institutions were people who most likely did not consent to having their remains used for scientific study. It is important that we try and identify who these people were, where they were from, and hopefully contact descendant communities for repatriation of these individuals. In the past she has worked with helping institutions become compliant with Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation (NAGPRA). Currently she is working on a project whose goal is to determine the identity of individuals whose skeletal remains were part of the global bone trade, a trade that was created to establish human skeletal remains to be used for teaching and study purposes. The hope is that one day we can rehumanize these individuals, and bring them back home.