Melanie Beasley

Dr. Beasley’s work focuses broadly on human-environment interactions throughout the hominin lineage when the environment is influencing our evolutionary history, in the Holocene when humans are influencing the availability of prey resources, and in modern forensic contexts when the environment imprints meaningful geolocation information in biological tissues. She uses stable isotope geochemistry to connect humans and the environment they live in to understand changing climate, resource availability, and life history. The use of stable isotope geochemistry and the big data generated by such an analytical method in anthropology has only scratched the surface of what it can offer to the discipline and its contributions to humanity’s grand challenges. Through her scholarship, she sees the Anthropology of Tomorrow as an interdisciplinary blending of the social and natural sciences in an applied approach that makes anthropology relevant to living communities. Dr. Beasley is interested in science communication to engage with the public about anthropology.