Anthropology Faculty Members Receive Major Awards in 2010-2011

Pascal Boyer, PhD, the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory, was awarded a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, Boyer was chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. He combines experimental (laboratory) studies with field research to show how human brains, by virtue of their evolutionary history, share certain conceptual dispositions that, in turn, make certain kinds of cultural concepts particularly easy to learn and transmit, and therefore very frequent in otherwise diverse human cultures. Boyer also uses psychological and anthropological techniques to describe the interaction between "collective memory"—how people in a group remember their past—and "individual memory," particularly autobiographical memory.

Fiona Marshall, PhD, professor of anthropology and professor of African and African-American studies, became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Election as a Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. Marshall is one of the world's pre-eminent scholars on the origins of agriculture in Africa and donkey domestication. Her research incorporates zooarchaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches to the beginnings of food production and the development of pastoralism in northeast Africa. She currently is studying the behavior of the African wild ass and the relationship of sociality to domestication processes in collaboration with the Saint Louis Zoo.

Shanti A. Parikh, PhD, associate professor of anthropology and associate professor of African and African-American studies, was named co-recipient of the Rosa L. Parks Award for her service in the community. The award was presented during the university's 24th annual celebration honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 17, 2011, in Graham Chapel. The Rosa L. Parks Award is presented annually to persons or organizations that exemplify the valor of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa L. Parks. In accepting the award, Parikh said, "The work toward equality is not yet done, as the theme of the evening's event reminds us. This award inspires me and gives me encouragement to continue the work of social justice here and around the world."

Erik Trinkaus, PhD, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences and professor of biological anthropology, will receive Washington University's 2011 Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award at a December ceremony. Considered by many to be the world's most influential scholar of Neandertal and early modern human biology and evolution, Trinkaus is a biological anthropologist who conducts research that focuses on the evolution of the genus Homo, the genus of modern humans, as a background to recent human diversity. Trinkaus' work has earned him international recognition, including election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996, one of the highest honors a scientist can achieve. He is a member of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris, and Anthropological Society of Nippon. Trinkaus has been a member of Washington University's faculty since 1997.

L. Lewis Wall, MD, DPhil, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, received a Distinguished Community Service Award from the Washington University School of Medicine. The school honored Wall for his work on fistula in West Africa. He founded the Worldwide Fistula Fund and built a hospital in Niger to treat this condition, which afflicts millions of young women living in conditions of extreme poverty and inadequate medical care. According to Wall, "In most cases, these women can be healed using low-technology surgery. If you can repair them, you can transform these women into healthy women with hope."