Maureen Devlin, Principal Investigator, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Maureen’s research focuses on the effect of environmental factors such as nutrition, physical activity, climate, and disease on human bone health. Modern humans live in diverse environments, eat a wide range of diets, and do varying amounts of exercise. How do these differences in lifestyle affect bone growth, maintenance, and loss? This is an important question for maximizing bone health and reducing osteoporosis risk in living populations, and for making behavioral inferences from the skeletal phenotypes we observe in the fossil record. She graduated from Harvard College with an AB cum laude in Anthropology (1996), followed by an MA in Anthropology at George Washington University (2000) and a PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University (2007). She completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (2007-12) before moving to the University of Michigan in 2012.
Miranda Cosman, PhD Candidate
Miranda graduated in 2015 from the University of Calgary with a B.Sc. Honours in Anthropology. Her past research focused on the relationship among bone traits such as strength and shape in a selectively bred line of mice. She is broadly interested in the relationship between bone growth, development, and locomotion. She hopes to apply these concepts to fossil taxa to better understand the mechanisms that create the morphological variation we currently see.
Taylor Spencer, PhD Candidate
Taylor graduated in May 2016 from the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) with a B.A. in Anthropology and a minor in African American Studies. Her research there quantitatively analyzed trabecular and cortical bone in past populations to better understand how ancestry impacted bone development. Broadly, her research interests center around bone variation, bone health/disease, and ancestry. She aims to understand how ancestry directly affects bone health and what that says about future targeted medicines and preventative strategies for degenerative disorders such as osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Rachel Hurwitz ’18
Rachel is a senior in the Residential College studying Evolutionary Anthropology, and Creative Writing and Literature. She is most interested in the intersections between social justice issues, endocrinology and bone maturation. In addition to her time spent in the Skeletal Biology Lab, she also works in the Division of Anatomical Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Cleo Moursi ’19 Cleo 
is a junior studying Evolutionary Anthropology. She will be staying at Michigan for a Masters of Public Health beginning in Fall 2018 in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the School of Public Health. Her interests include the impact of diet on obesity and chronic disease. After graduation, she plans to become a registered dietitian and work to improve the current food environment to be more conducive to nutritional health. In her free time, Cleo instructs yoga on campus through Recreational Sports.
Lab alumni
Katarina Alajbegovic ’16
Katarina majored in Evolutionary Anthropology with a minor in Medical Anthropology. After working with the Community HealthCorps in Chicago she has now returned to U of M Medical School.
Tim Brash ’16
Tim graduated from University of Michigan with a B.S. in Biochemistry and a minor in Medical Anthropology. He is now a student at Wayne State University Medical School.
Amy Robbins ’15
Amy graduated from U of M with a Bachelor’s in Evolutionary Anthropology and Japanese Studies. She is now a PhD student in the Department of Biology at the University of Oregon.
Lily Shipp ’17
Lily graduated from U of M with a double major in Evolutionary Anthropology and Art History. She is now completing the Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award program at the National Institutes of Health.
