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A Semester in Review

Another semester gone calls for another semester review! This fall makes two years of the MSUFAL blog and being active on social media. Our hope when creating these outlets was to increase transparency of the importance of the work we do here at the lab for the public, our friends, families, and colleagues in academia. We hope you are enjoying learning all about our work. This fall has been quite a busy time for our team here at the MSUFAL. It is our first full semester in our new Giltner Hall lab (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Dr. Carolyn Isaac, Alex Goots, and Micayla Spiros in the new Giltner lab. Photo credit: Jackie Hawthorne.

We have returned to in-person lab meetings which have included a number of interesting presentations this year. A few included a lecture on histology & microscopy by alumna Dr. Lindsay Jenny and a presentation by Dr. MariaTeresa Tersigni-Tarrant (Figure 2) on her work as a NCMEC forensic anthropologist and career advice on forging your own path.

For all accepted and published publications referenced in this blog, please see the list at the end of the post.

Figure 2. Dr. MariaTeresa Tersigni-Tarrant discussing her NCMEC work

Dr. Carolyn Isaac, our lab director, along with department chair Dr. Todd Fenton, and Dr. Joseph Hefner were awarded a $480,000 Strategic Partnership Grant from the MSU foundation in conjunction with forensic chemist Dr. Smith, forensic entomologists Dr. Benbow and Dr. Pechal, and computer scientist Dr. Ross. This grant, the Consortium for the Integrated Forensic Applications, Collaborations, and Technology Systems (IFACTS), has a multitude of ongoing developments including an anthropological project developing an automated system to match medical imaging from the same person to be utilized in comparative radiography for scientific identification purposes. Undergraduate, Mikayla Calverley, has been working with Dr. Isaac closely on this project. Dr. Isaac has also had three articles accepted for publication this semester in the following journals: Forensic Anthropology, the Journal of Forensic Sciences, and the International Journal of Legal Medicine. Dr. Isaac simultaneously taught ANP 844, a laboratory methods course offered here to graduate students in the anthropology department and was a guest instructor for the Michigan State Police Homicide School.  Along with PhD students Micayla Spiros, Alex Goots, Rhian Dunn, and Clara Devota, Dr. Isaac was an integral part of the joint mission for exhuming unknown individuals for DNA collection and submission to NamUs for Operation UNITED (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Micayla Spiros, Alex Goots, Rhian Dunn, Clara Devota, and Dr. Carolyn Isaac at Operation UNITED.

This semester, Dr. Joseph Hefner, was awarded a $1,447,281 NIH grant as a co-principal investigator with Dr. Melissa Clarkson (University of Kentucky). For more information on this grant, “Developing standardized graphic libraries for anatomy: A focus on human craniofacial anatomy and phenotypes”, read all about it on the MSU Department of Anthropology’s website. This semester, Dr. Hefner had an article accepted for publication with Alex Goots, Confronting Cognitive Bias in Forensic Anthropology: Michigan’s Craigslist Killer Case. Dr. Hefner has also had four publications come out including three journal articles and a book chapter, co-authored by Dr. Rebecca Redfern, in Volume Three: A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350-1550) edited by Drs. Kimberly Coles & Dorothy Kim. Dr. Hefner has also been teaching the honors section of “ANP 206: Introduction to Physical (Biological) Anthropology”. In non-academic news, Dr. Hefner has also welcomed a brand new pup to his home, Augustine (Augie) and she is slowly becoming our unofficial lab mascot.

Amber Plemons, doctoral candidate, had the opportunity to travel to the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki, Finland to finish her dissertation data collection (Figure 4)! From Finland, she hopped a plane directly to New York City to fill one of the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner’s (OCME) Visiting Scientist positions in Forensic Anthropology for the month of November. Between data collection and her rotation at the OCME, Amber somehow still found time to get an article accepted to the SAA Archaeological Record, submitted an article to the Science & Justice Special Issue: The Future of Teaching, Training and Learning in Forensic and Crime Sciences, and had an abstract accepted for presentation at the 2022 AAFS meeting. She also worked this semester as a Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) fellow creating geocache tours, working on manuscripts on residue analysis, and was an instructor at Oakland University, teaching “AN 1111: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology”.

Figure 4. Amber Plemons at the Finnish Museum of Natural History

Doctoral candidate, Kelly Kamnikar, was awarded a Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her final academic year at MSU. She had the opportunity to use these funds to travel to the Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Forenses de Guatemala in Guatemala City (read about her experience here). She is now finishing data analysis and writing the last of her dissertation chapters. She also had the opportunity to travel to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Invited by the International Committee of the Red Cross regional delegation in Mexico and local delegation in Honduras, she provided training to forensic experts across Honduras and El Salvador on current methodology in forensic anthropology (Figure 5). Kelly also is a collaborator on a 2022 HHRRC grant for “The Georgian Recovery, Documentation, Identification Project (GRDIP): Anthropological Analysis of Victims of the 1937-1938 Soviet Repressions in Adjara” with Dr. Meri Gonashvili and the Georgian Association of Forensic Anthropology (GAFA). GRDIP aims to scientifically excavate mass graves in Georgia of individuals killed during the 1920 and 1930 repressions in the region. This grant will help fund analysis of 120 previously excavated individuals from four mass graves, aiming to provide biological profile information and DNA samples for identification. She also works as a graduate researcher on an NIJ grant “Investigation of subadult dental age-at-death estimation using transition analysis and machine learning methods”. With this grant, she helped mentor undergraduate Carolynn Sauter, working with her on an AAFS project that was accepted this semester for presentation in February. Lastly, she had an article accepted to the Forensic Anthropology journal as a first author focusing on craniometric variation in Medellín, Colombia which is now available in early view. This manuscript is in press and will be published in both English and Spanish.

Figure 5. Kelly Kamnikar with ICRC regional advisor, Dr. Carlos Mejía Dueñas, and the director of Forensic Medicine, Dr. Ismael Raudales.

Alex Goots, doctoral candidate, has been working this semester as the department research assistant. With this position she accumulates, writes, and formats the department’s semester newsletter about students and faculty in the department. She also releases the news updates to the department’s website and social media. Alex had two papers accepted, one in Forensic Anthropology, on cognitive bias in forensic anthropology, and another in Forensic Science International: Reports, on blunt force trauma in the human mandible. She also had an abstract accepted to AAFS focusing on a cold case at the MSUFAL of a possible gender–variant individual. Alex also had the opportunity give a lecture via Zoom to a class of high schoolers. Her remaining time of this semester has focused on dissertation writing.

Fifth year PhD student, Elena Watson, has been enjoying her time working as a first semester, teaching assistant in the Division of Human Anatomy. She has also spent this semester writing her annotated bibliographies and preparing to take her comprehensive exams in the spring. For her dissertation, Elena is studying a skeletal assemblage from medieval Nubia that has been curated at MSU under direction of the British Museum. She finished collected her data for her dissertation using these skeletal remains this semester.

Micayla Spiros, fourth year PhD student, is the department’s online course assistant this year. Working with archaeologist, Dr. Ethan Watrall, she has been organizing and maintaining 12 online anthropology courses that are offered in the summer. This position also includes spending her time creating an online course— ANP 441: Forensic Anthropology & Osteology. This includes creating lectures and laboratories that will be entirely housed online. She will be creating three-dimensional scans of the MSUFAL Donated collection in the spring to incorporate into this course. This semester she has also held the position as a Cultural Heritage Informatics Senior Fellow. She is creating a website on the history of forensic anthropology in the United States aiming to create a resource for students and community in the field. Micayla, along with Amber Plemons and MSU bioarchaeology student Jack Biggs, submitted an article to Science & Justice and had their abstract accepted to AAFS both focusing on pedagogy, access, and ethics in digital biological anthropology. This semester Micayla has been working on submitting her dissertation proposal, planning to defend it in the spring, and helping in the MSUFAL (Figure 6). She has also continued her position as the social media manager for MSUFAL (Twitter, Facebook, & Instagram), the Forensic Anthropology journal (Twitter, Facebook, & Instagram), and the Georgian Association of Forensic Anthropology (Website, Twitter & Facebook).

Figure 6. Micayla Spiros (left) and Alex Goots (right) in the new Giltner Hall MSUFAL Lab (Note: Human remains are casts.) Photo credit: Jackie Hawthorne.

Third year PhD student, Rhian Dunn, is this year’s MSUFAL laboratory manager. She manages the administration of forensic cases from case file creation through disposition. She is also serving as the co-president of the Graduate Students in Anthropology running the monthly meetings with her co-president, archaeologist Emily Milton. She is also a returning CAP fellow focusing her semester on a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” Twine project illustrating the excavations that have been carried out by the MSU Campus Archaeologists. Along with co-CAP fellows, Rhian had an article published to the SAA Archaeological Record with Jack Biggs, Jeff Burnet, Emily Milton, and Amber Plemons. She will be presenting a poster at AAFS this year— “Exploring Forensic Research Interests of a United States-Based Anthropology Faculty” and had another accepted as a co-author with Dr. Carolyn Isaac and Kent State University PhD Student, Kerianne Armelli. She has also been taking a class with Dr. Isaac this semester focusing on photography and radiography in forensic anthropology. She has also, accidentally but successfully, killed two of her house plants.

Clara Devota, first year PhD student, has been splitting her first semester between classwork and Dr. Isaac’s acting research assistant. Clara’s classes this semester include Cultural and Linguistic Theory, Bioarchaeology, and Dr. Isaac’s photography and radiography course. As a research assistant, Clara has been helping Dr. Isaac write research articles associated with the NIJ grant, “Investigations on the Cellular and Morphologic Characteristics of Cranial Vault Fracture: Research and Development of a Time Since Fracture Protocol and Database”, two of which have been published thus far. Clara also won the National Institute of Justice American Indian & Alaska Native Student Travel Scholarship to attend both the American Society of Criminology and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meetings.

This semester has been a busy one for all! With everyone able to be back in person (thank you for vaccinations & masks!) we have all jumped back into action. To get more updates throughout the semester, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, & Instagram!

Upcoming AAFS Presentations

A1 Pedagogical Access and Ethical Considerations in Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Micayla Spiros, MSc*; Amber Plemons, MA; Jack Biggs, MA

A8 Exploring Forensic Research Interests of a United States–Based Anthropology Faculty Rhian Dunn, MS*; Christopher Rainwater, MS; Nicholas Passalacqua, PhD

A17 Understanding Skeletal and Body Donation in Forensic Anthropology: Developments and Procedures Kerianne Armelli, MS*; Rhian Dunn, MS; Carolyn Isaac, PhD

A113 When a Reanalysis Changes Everything: A Cold Case Study of a Possible Gender–Variant Individual Alexis Goots, MA*; Carolyn Isaac, PhD; Todd Fenton, PhD

A136 The Impact of Sex and Population Affinity on the Dental Development of Subadult Individuals Carolynn Sauter, BS*; Kelly Kamnikar, MA; Joseph Hefner, PhD; Nicholas Herrmann, PhD; Jennifer Spence, PhD

Publications

In Press Armelli K, Christensen E, Isaac C, Cornelison J. Steam Kettle Skeletal Preparation: An Efficient Method for Processing Human Remains. Forensic Anthropology.

In Press Cornelison JB, Isaac CV, Devota CJ, Billian J, Brown TB, deJong JL, Douglas EA, Fisher- Hubbard AO, Lackey-Cornelison WL, Prahlow JA, Shattuck BL. A Comparison of Three Decalcification Agents for Assessments of Cranial Fracture Histomorphology. Journal of Forensic Sciences.

In Press Isaac CV, Cornelison JB, Prahlow JA, Devota CJ, Christensen ER. The Repository of Antemortem Injury Response (REPAIR): An Online Database for Skeletal Injuries of Known Ages. International Journal of Legal Medicine.

In Press Biggs JA, Burnett JJ, Dunn RR, Milton EBP, Plemons AM. Campus archaeology program at Michigan State University: Reevaluating our program during a pandemic. SAA Archaeological Record.

In Press Goots A, Hefner JT, Start D. Cognitive Bias in Forensic Anthropology: Michigan’s Craigslist Killer Case. Forensic Anthropology.

2021 Goots A, Isa M, Fenton T, Wei F. Blunt force trauma in the human mandible: An experimental investigation. Forensic Science International: Reports. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsir.2021.100252.

Early View Kamnikar KR, Hefner JT, Monsalve T, Bernal Flores L. Craniometric variation in a regional sample from Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia: Implications for forensic work in the Americas. Forensic Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2020.2023.

2021 Metric sexual dimorphism of the skull in Thailand. Techataweewan N, Hefner JT, Freas L, Surachotmongkhon N, Benchawattananon R, Tayles N. Forensic Science International: Reports. 4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665910721000670.

2021 Eugene “Gene” Giles. Biography. Hefner JTForensic Anthropology. 4(2). http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/1550.

2021 The use of bone fluorescence to facilitate DNA sampling. Eleftheriou T, Papaioannou K, Christensen AM, Hefner JTForensic Anthropology. 3(4). http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/1406.

2021 Race and ScienceRedfern R and Hefner JT. In: K Coles and D Kim (Eds). Volume Three: A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350-1550). Bloomsbury Academic: London. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/cultural-history-of-race-9781350067578/.

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