GMU's eighth annual Undergraduate Research Symposium showcased the work of 91 students, 12 students in oral presentations and 79 poster presentations. Two anthropology students were among the 7 winners in this year's competition.
Chrysanthi Violaris won "Best Overall Research and Scholarship in the Post Presentation Category with her project on "Patterns of Juvenile Growth and Development in Pre-Industrialized Agricultural Communities." She worked on the project with Professor Bethany Usher on femur length of sub-adults across different populations and the ability for physical anthropologists to predict adult height. She came to some important conclusions about the mechanisms for projecting and calculating both adult height and about the practice of using femoral length to estimate age in sub-adult populations (specifically to avoid that measure).
Ethan Murdock won for "Outstanding Poster Presentation" with his project on Surface Soil Analysis. He was working on a soil chemistry analysis of a historic archaeological site on GMU campus. Ethan collaborated with fellow anthropology student, Haley Hoffman, who had won an OSCAR award for her own archaeological project. Ethan designed a soil chemistry analysis to compare to Haley's archaeological data. He was able to establish a phosphate trace that correlated roughly with the artifact distributions. He was also able to find correlations between the pH of the soils and runnoff from the adjacent water tower and soil descriptions that can lead to future research.
Congratulations to them both!
May 03, 2016
