SHESC Year in Review

Photo: ASU President Michael Crow presents the President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness to Megan Jehn and her team.

Year in Review 2021

From the Director

Accelerating through 2021 and beyond: A time of renewal with much to be proud of 2021 was a year of renewed energy and growth at SHESC – a credit to the tireless work of our faculty and staff. We continued to adapt and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, returning to full immersion classes in Tempe and moving ahead with key research initiatives.

We welcomed five new tenured and tenuretrack colleagues to the faculty, adding a wealth of scholarly power and a growing focus on peoples of the African diaspora. They are already beginning projects that will enhance our understanding of the world and serve students for years to come.

Our enrollments continue to trend in the right direction, even after a record-breaking year of online growth in 2020. We are seeking opportunities to share our expertise with even more learners. The ASU Online space will be critical to those efforts, as we successfully launched an MS in global health and a BS in anthropology this year. I am excited to watch those programs grow in the years ahead.

Over the semester break, many of our evolutionary anthropologists will be moving to a state-of-the-art facility in ISTB-7, expanding both the resources of the Institute of Human Origins and the available space in other SHESC locations. The move reminds us that ASU is “one university in many places,” as our school operations span the Tempe campus and include other key locations, including

the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve and Alameda facility.

Outside the classroom, we continue to engage with students where they are. Our academic advising team meets with students in person and virtually. Staff have worked tirelessly to offer a range of opportunities and events, including career panels, trivia nights, student organization gatherings and more – many of those in hybrid formats.

We have also reopened the Innovation Gallery to visitors during regular business hours, with plans to install a full exhibition for the spring semester. This space provides a unique opportunity to showcase our work and engage with community partners. I invite you to think about ways the gallery could help tell stories in your area.

I want to offer a special thank you to Associate Professor Megan Jehn for her unwavering service to science, to our campus, and to the community throughout this pandemic. Her team received the President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness this fall, well-deserved recognition for efforts to help the Town of Guadalupe respond to COVID-19. This project, and others like it, inspire us to do great things.

At SHESC, we are not just idling through this unique time in history. We are accelerating.

Thanks for all you do, Chris Stojanowski Director and Professor

2021 by the numbers

5

20

23k

new faculty members

million dollars in grant applications

Grew to 23,000 annual enrollments

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297 degrees awarded 2021

SKOPE Project

Professor emeritus of archaeology dedicated to making data more accessible for everyone

Professor Emeritus Keith Kintigh and a team of archaeologists and environmental and computer scientists developed a new software system making paleoenvironmental data easily accessible.

Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments, or SKOPE, is a National Science Foundation-funded web application that provides high-resolution data on past climates for the last 2,000 years. The software will go live in the next few weeks and will allow researchers to obtain reconstructed climate data visualized with animation and graphs.

“For any research area in the Southwest US, down to a single 800-meter square, SKOPE can give you a reasonable estimate of the annual rainfall and growing season heat accumulation in AD 1073, or for whatever date you choose within the last 2,000 years,” Kintigh said. “SKOPE offers these highly detailed climate reconstructions for Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah while offering a reconstructed drought index at a coarser spatial resolution for the contiguous 48 United States.”

Kintigh collaborated with Professor Ann Kinzig in the School of Life Sciences and Associate Research Professional Allen Lee in the School

of Complex Adaptive Systems at ASU. They also worked with archaeology colleagues at Washington State University and the University of Montana and with computer scientists at the University of Illinois.

Kintigh said this software will be useful not only for archaeologists but to anyone who can productively apply information about past climates to their own research, including other scientists and scholars as well as planners.

Kintigh said these climate reconstructions have been available for years, however, until now, they required highly specialized knowledge to access and use because the files are truly enormous and are only available in formats that are not familiar to most researchers who might wish to use them.

“We wanted to make paleoenvironmental data available to ordinary mortals so they could easily get it and use it, and that is what we’ve done,” he said.

Kintigh taught at ASU for 32 years, led the development of the Digital Archaeological Record and established the Center for Digital Antiquity. Besides his continued work with tDAR and SKOPE, Kintigh is also co-President of the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis.

2021 Year in Review | 3

New faculty

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments Here are just a few examples of what our team has achieved this calendar year:

Yohannes Haile-Selassie Professor

Elisabeth Kago IIboudo Nébié Assistant Professor

Matthew Kroot Assistant Professor

Faculty

Staff

l Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez earned the

l Processed more than 60

Distinguished Achievement Award in

research grant applications

the Critical Study of North America from

l Hosted a range of events,

SANA.

including career panels, trivia

l Meskerem Glegziabher organized and night and graduation receptions. moderated five virtual colloquia focused

l Wrote 21 ASU News stories

on diversity, equity and inclusion.

l Welcomed back in-person

l C. Michael Barton received a $4.2

visitors to the Deer Valley

million NSF award to support modeling

Petroglyph Preserve to support

of human and Earth systems.

our work in the community.

SHESC Undergraduate Majors (Fall)

Robin Nelson Associate Professor

Denise Su Associate Professor

New staff Daniel Anderson

Retirements

Research Advancement Specialist

Christiana Hammond

Amy Drew

Robert Johnson

Research Advancement Administrator

Rebecca Cady

Graduate Academic Success Coordinator

Christopher Caseldine Collections Manager

Sander van der Leeuw Foundation Professor

Juliette Dixon

David Decker Program Manager, Digital Antiquity

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Administrative Associate, Teotihuacan Research Lab

Business Operations Specialist

Office Specialist

Laurel Millard Regina Gutierrez Assistant Director of Operations

Business Operations Specialist Sr.

Nicole Pomerantz

Communications Specialist

In the News 54 total ASU News stories about the school published in 2021

ASU grad students launch project to illustrate diversity in anthropology Graduate student Liam Gleason was frustrated by the lack of diversity shown in depictions of anthropologists, so they decided to create their own. Gleason formed a team to create a series of free-to-use illustrations.

Imaginary animal battles advance science communication Associate Professor Katie Hinde explains why March Mammal Madness has become so popular and how the team hopes to inspire other scientists. MMM is powered by science, social media and imagination.

ASU anthropologists consider the challenges of extreme weight loss in book Sociocultural anthropologists, including President’s Professors Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich, published a book about their interviews and surveys with bariatric patients in Arizona. The team gained a remarkable understanding of extreme weight loss.

2021 Year in Review | 5

In the News Read all of our news stories at shesc.asu.edu/about/news

Enrollment open for new online global health master’s degree at ASU The Master of Science in global health, offered through ASU Online, provides graduate-level training for careers in government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, private-sector companies and research teams.

Understanding past climate change ‘tipping points’ can help us prepare for the future Geoarchaeologists and anthropologists, including Professor C. Michael Barton and Foundation Professor Sander van der Leeuw, published a paper about past abrupt climate changes, what led to the events and what lessons they hold for today.

Guadalupe COVID-19 Community Response Team receives university, town honors Associate Professor Megan Jehn and her team worked in Guadalupe to provide case investigations, contact tracing and other public health services. The team recieved the ASU President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness.

6 | School of Human Evolution and Social Change

SHESC People Faculty Feature: Robin Nelson Exploring how COVID has reshaped familes Associate Professor Robin Nelson joined SHESC this year and will be teaching ASB 305 Poverty and Global Health in spring 2022.

“I am currently exploring the social lives, psychosocial development and physical health of children who have lost their primary caregivers. I am particularly interested in the ways that the COVID epidemic has reshaped families and left many communities struggling to reconstitute their care circles in the wake of this devastating pandemic.”

Student Feature: Morgen Julia Schreiner Online SHESC student gets involved Morgen Julia Schreiner is an online anthropology and history major graduating this fall. She recently shared her SHESC experience in the ASU News article, “ASU graduate combines her love of history, artifacts.”

Question: What’s something you learned while at ASU that surprised you or changed you? Answer: “To work with others and celebrate all victories. With ASU being such a large institution, there are nearly endless possibilities. Working with other students and celebrating their victories and opportunities instead of in competition with them has brought me greater success than only looking out for myself ever has.”

Alumni Feature: Azalea Thomson Grateful for SHESC laboratory opportunities Azalea Thomson graduated from SHESC in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in global health. Inspired by her courses and the skills she learned in Professor Daniel Hruschka’s laboratory, she is currenlty a post-bachelor fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics. She currenlty models congenital birth defects and hemoglobinopathies.

“Sickle cell is the most common inherited disease, but it receives a lot less funding than cystic fibrosis, for example,” she said.

“Hopefully this paper that I’m working on will draw more attention to it and that can some day lead to improved health.”

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Our centers and programs SHESC centers and programs continue to impress with interdisciplinary research, community outreach activities and learning opportunities for our students. Look for additional projects in 2022.

Teotihuacan Reseach Laboratory Staff of the Teotihuacan Research Laboratory in San Juan Teotihuacan, Mexico, initiated the process of returning older collections of artifacts to Mexican authorities. According to Mexican law, all artifacts belong to the nation. When archaeological projects are completed, archaeologists must turn over the materials to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). As a result of negotiations between ASU and INAH, several collections of artifacts from past non-ASU archaeological projects were delivered to INAH. Meanwhile, at ASU, two types of Teotihuacan activities were carried out: (1) Students helped process and archive research notes and materials from the longterm Teotihuacan Mapping Project and (2) Spatial analysis of the Teotihuacan map advanced greatly.

Center for Global Health Current and past CGH Culture, Health and Environment Laboratory students volunteered for the ASU SeroSurvey, which aimed to better understand the prevalence and distribution of COVID-19 antibodies in the ASU community. The data will be used to inform ASU’s COVID-19 management strategy and help ASU prepare for the future.

@ASUBeingHuman