Winter 2026 Newsletter

At the same time, we bid farewell to three long-time colleagues who retired in 2025: Peter Lape, Devon Peña, and Bettina Shell-Duncan.

And speaking of milestones—congratulations to our newest PhDs!

• Michael Esveldt (Feb 2025, Sociocultural Anthropology) — Dissertation: Staying With the Patient: An Ethnography of Primary Care Current position

• Cristina Gildee (June 2025, Biological Anthropology) — Dissertation: Bone Functional Adaptation: Life History Constraints and Implications for Aging Research. Dr. Gildee is now a Postdoctoral Fellow with UW’s NIH/NIA T32 program

• Miguel Ochoa (June 2025, Biological Anthropology) — Dissertation: Crural Indices in Neanderthals and Modern Humans: Implications for Limb Proportions, Environment, and Body Size Variation. Dr. Ochoa is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and School of Medicine at Duke University

• Luo Juan (Dec 2025, Sociocultural Anthropology) — Dissertation: Border Crossing, Collaboration, and Transition: Health Care Entanglements of an International NGO on the China-Myanmar Border. Current position

• Douglas Avella-Castro (Dec 2025, Sociocultural Anthropology) — Dissertation: Becoming Men, Becoming Human: Building Refuge, Masculinity and Worthiness in a Puerto Rican Church. Dr. Avella-Castro joins Highline Community College as tenure-track faculty in Sociology

Accolades

Our faculty continue to shine on the global stage:

• Holly Barker earned the Hanford Hero Award from Hanford College for her nuclear justice work with students and Indigenous communities. She was also nominated for the UW President’s Medal for Global Engagement
• Laada Bilaniuk was featured in the documentary MEME WARS and awarded a prestigious Harvard Ukrainian Research Fellowship
• Promotions to Full Professor: Rachel Chapman and Dan Eisenberg
• Sara Gonzalez stepped into a major leadership role as Interim Executive Director of the Burke Museum, overseeing a $15M budget and 100+ staff serving the museum’s ~70,000 annual visitors and many outreach activities
• Paula Saravia was nominated for a UW Distinguished Teaching Award

New Research and Curriculum Spotlights

Innovation and impact defined our year:

• Ann Anagnost expanded her garden internship program at Picardo Farm. Her Spring 2025 practicum blended a curriculum in soil science, health, and community engagement with hands-on learning for 15 students—while providing “free farmers markets” and meals to vulnerable Seattle communities
• Rachel Chapman and partners started work on a $1.425M community collaboration grant awarded to Byrd Barr Place and the UW Anti-Racist Center for Health (ARCH), aimed at improving perinatal outcomes among Black birthing people in Washington
• Jade d’Alpoim Guedes and student Erin Gamble secured a UW Student Technology Fee Grant ($54,985) to upgrade the paleoethnobotany lab with cutting-edge microscopy tools
• Jade d’Alpoim Guedes led five UW students - Kara Johnson, Rony Guzman, Carys Dimmerer-King, Zahra Henken, and Charlotte Houston - on the latest phase of the International Collaborative Archaeological Project in Jiuzhaigou. Together, the team is investigating how long people have occupied the terraces throughout the reserve and how past communities modified their environment. It is currently the only international collaborative archaeological project operating in China, read more International Collaborative Archaeological Project in Jiuzhaigou | Department of Anthropology | University of Washington
• Ben Fitzhugh and PhD alum Hollis Miller began work on the multi-site collaborative Belmont Forum Coastal TALES project. Their work will in part document Nuniaq heritage storytelling for climate adaptation in Old Habor Alaska
• Patricia Kramer, Andrea Duncan, and PhD alum Alex Hammerberg launched a new NIH/NIA project funded by the Johns Hopkins University AITC a2 Pilot Award program. The study innovates use of accelerometry technology in commercial earbuds to detect gait perturbations
• Peter Lape began oversight of a $1.495M contract for archaeological curation on behalf of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Seattle

Recent Events

Our department buzzed with activity:

• In Fall 2024, Jade d’Alpoim Guedes and students hosted heritage workshops on traditional Batik and indigo dyeing at UW and the Burke Museum, engaging 100+ participants (funding from CAIIS Native Knowledge Award and the Center for Chinese Studies)
• In Winter 2025 Marieke van Eijk started a weekly “Sit, Sip, and Knit” meeting to create community and belonging through arts & crafts
• Summer 2025 saw Holly Barker co-lead a UW Population Health Initiative community-led workshop at the Burke Museum, connecting communities from Hanford, Missouri, and the Marshall Islands impacted by nuclear weapons development to build reparative connections and health strategies
• In September of 2025, Sven Haakanson collaborated for over 5 years with three Coast Salish carvers, Tyson Simmons, Keith Stevenson (Muckleshoot) and Al Charles (Lower Elwha) to create a Coast Salish Story Pole for UW campus, it was installed near Denny Hall. This story pole design is now the new Anthropology logo

• In September 2025, Jenna Grant co-chaired the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) International Conference, bringing 1,000+ global scholars to UW—a major showcase for the Provost’s Society & Technology Initiative
• We also welcomed Dr. Tracie Canada for the 4th Sam Dubal Memorial Lecture in Autumn 2025, continuing our commitment to critical conversations in medical anthropology that honor Dr. Sam Dubal’s legacy
• In October, the department hosted our annual Halloween pumpkin carving event for Anthropology students

• In December 2025, Jenna Grant, on behalf of the UW Center for Southeast Asia & its Diasporas (CSEAD), organized the forum, "Khmer Language @ UW: Pasts and Futures".  In collaboration with the UW Khmer Student Association (KhSA), the Cambodian American Community Council of Washington (CACCWA) and the Khmer Community of Seattle-King County (KCSKC), this event brought together Khmer communities and allies on and off-campus to celebrate 14 years of a thriving Khmer (Cambodian) language program

  

  Photo by Jenna Grant: Soursdey Sou (top right, MAGH major) and UW Khmer Student Association students speak about the significance of the Khmer language program

Quarterly Reading List: Six Breakthrough Publications

Our faculty and students are shaping conversations in top journals:

Archeology

• Nature Ecology & Evolution (d’Alpoim Guedes and colleagues, 2024) — Pushes back the timeline of high-altitude human settlement by 2,000 years, showing that foragers were relied on lacustrine resources and became sedentary earlier than previously thought
• PNAS (Marwick and colleagues, 2025) — Challenges long-held assumptions about technological uniformity in East Asia, revealing unexpected diversity and innovation among early humans in East Asia

Biological Anthropology

• American Journal of Human Biology (Kunkle*, Eisenberg and colleagues, 2025) — Suggest ADHD-linked genetic traits may confer social advantages in certain ecological contexts among Kenyan pastoralist communities (*PhD candidate)
• American Journal of Human Biology (Gildee* and Kramer, 2025) — Relationships between parity and bone mineral density vary across skeletal regions and in association with key social and behavioral factors (*2025 PhD recipient)

Sociocultural Anthropology

• Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (Chapman, Mohamed*, Pfeiffer and colleagues, 2024) — A perinatal home screening program empowered Black communities to improve antenatal patient-provider outcomes during COVID-19 (*PhD student)
• American Anthropologist (Govindrajan and colleagues, 2025) — Exposes how extremist environmental narratives are used to justify authoritarian and exclusionary politics globally, and calls for contrasting collaborative climate discourse

Research Disruptions