Staff profile

My PhD involves assessing the way ancestry is used to construct biological profiles in forensic anthropology with a specific focus on dental methods. I am using the two versions of rASUDAS which score either 21 or 32 dental morphological traits and uses a naïve Bayesian algorithm to ouput the decimal likelihood of the individuals belonging to each of seven ancestral groups. My thesis research is split into five sections:

• Biodistance analysis of traits within the evaluated ancestral groups (European and Asian)
• Determining whether there is a difference between the estimations from the two methods for each individual
• Measuring the inter- and intra-observer error with repeats done by myself and by anthropology and archaeology students or staff
• Evaluating whether there is change in trait trends over time in European populations
• The inclusion of South Asian populations as these are underrepresented groups in the study of ancestry

This research builds on my masters research which looked at cranial methods for estimating ancestry by evaluating the consistency of estimations between five different methods and considering the likely ancestral groups of the individuals in the study population.

• Dentition and Dental Pathology
• Forensic Anthropology
• Human Osteology
• Human Bioarchaeology
• Human Skeletal Curation