About Our Contributors

Ken Weiss is an Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Genetics at Penn State University. He has a long standing interest in issues of developmental and evolutionary genetics, as well as the more philosophical issues of complexity and epistemological questions of how we know what we know. He writes a regular column on these issues in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology. They can be accessed here.  He and Anne Buchanan are coauthors of The Mermaid's Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things (2009) and Genetics and The Logic of Evolution (2004). 

Anne Buchanan is an Adjunct Senior Research Associate in the Anthropology Department at Penn State. Her doctorate is in Public Health, and she is a long time collaborator with Ken Weiss on projects in developmental and evolutionary genetics as well as complex traits and why they are so difficult to understand. 






Holly Dunsworth is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. Click here for a collection of her writings. 

Dan Parker (Ph.D. Penn State Anthropology and Demography) is an Anthropologist, Demographer and Medical Geographer.  He is currently doing postdoctoral work at Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, a field station of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, in Thailand.  He enjoys doing field work, statistical analysis and modeling and likes to collaborate with lab researchers.  Most of his current work has to do with mapping and understanding the spatial dynamics of malaria in Karen State (Kawthoolei), Myanmar.  You can see a list of some of his research publications here and here.  

Jim Wood is Professor of Anthropology and Demography at Penn State.  His research concerns the interaction of biological, socioeconomic, and environmental variables in determining health and survival in the rural preindustrial and developing worlds – with a special focus on early childhood mortality in traditional farming communities.  He has done fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and northern Scotland, and is currently trying to establish a new field project in northern Laos.  His students, of whom he is inordinately proud, have worked in Thailand, Bangladesh, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Mali, Kenya, Scotland, and Denmark. His new book The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming: Population, Food and Family is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.