Departmental News

Posted:  May 09, 2019 - 02:30pm

The UNM Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce the establishment of the UNM Anthropology Dissertation Fellowship Award. The fellowship is awarded to an outstanding anthropology graduate student conducting multidisciplinary research with potential public policy implications and is intended for students who have completed their research and are in the write up phase of their dissertation. Anthropology graduate students in any of the three subfields, Ethnology, Archaeology, and Evolutionary Anthropology are eligible for consideration.  Kristin Sabbi, Evolutionary Anthropology doctoral candidate, has been awarded the 2019-2020 UNM Anthropology Dissertation Fellowship.

Kris Sabbi joined the program in 2012 to study primate behavior, endocrinology, and life history under Drs Melissa Emery Thompson and Martin Muller. Her dissertation project comprises a multi-year interdisciplinary study of wild chimpanzee social development with two primary goals. First, she uses traditional methodologies in field-based primatology, including observational behavioral data, to characterize how young chimpanzees interact with other group members and situates chimpanzee social development in the context of understanding human developmental patterns. Second, drawing from established methodologies in endocrinology and developmental psychology, she examines how hormones, early-life social experience, and underlying differences in attention, shape male and female social behavior during development. Early results reveal sex differences in all three factors, indicating that gendered human socialization overlies an already complex system of coordinated and interactive social, neurological, and hormonal developmental processes. Since joining the program her research has been funded internally by the department of anthropology, GPSA, and OGS; and externally by the American Philosophical Society, Sigma Xi, the Nacey Maggioncalda Foundation, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Leakey Foundation. She has presented results from her research at nine regional, national, and international conferences, winning three awards.