Human Health Research
2023-Present: Postdoctoral work
I am currently conducting postdoctoral work concerning the spread and detection of drug resistant gonorrhea in the US. More detail will be added soon.
2021-Present: Instead of Human Anatomy, Anthropologists Must Teach Humanistic Anatomy
Abstract: Historically, the study of human anatomy has had a very complex relationship with race and racism in the United States. Today, BIPOC students are disproportionately excluded from the health sciences, in part because anatomy courses play the role of “gatekeepers” for the health professions. Anatomy instructors–including biological anthropologists teaching anatomy-may passively support white supremacy in science and medicine by ignoring anatomy’s problematic history and by teaching in outdated, exclusionary ways, rather than using anatomy courses as opportunities to provide insight into structural racism and support the success of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or a Person of Color (BIPOC). The objectives of this work were to 1) uncover how latent racism in anatomy and anatomy education may be contributing to marginalized students’ exclusion from health care careers, and 2) offer recommendations which will promote the success of BIPOC health sciences students and produce antiracist healthcare practitioners of all identities. Historical, anthropological, and critical pedagogical analysis of anatomy education was conducted. Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2018) was used as a theoretical framework for dissecting the ways in which the traditional pedagogy of anatomy may be particularly exclusionary for BIPOC students in the US. Pedagogical recommendations and recent case studies were collected from the academic literature. Anatomy instructors and medical schools are encouraged to develop a new, humanistic way of teaching anatomy, which requires extensive changes to the anatomy curriculum. Five categories of reform are recommended: improving pedagogical training for anatomy instructors, reconsidering course organization and modalities, emphasizing variation, implementing culturally-responsive teaching and improving culture, and including history in the anatomy curriculum.
This work was published in Teaching Anthropology in 2024 (https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v13i1.712). I hope to continue this work, including extending it to consider intersections with sex and gender, when I next have the opportunity to teach human anatomy.
Su 2013: Dana Intern, W. Montague Cobb Laboratory, howard University, Washington DC
Between my junior and senior years at Ithaca College, I had the opportunity to work with my advisor, Dr. Jen Muller, on the skeletal collection where she had conducted her dissertation research. I was lucky enough to be funded for this research through the Ithaca College Dana Internship program, a competitive internal summer research funding program at Ithaca College. During this internship, I worked at the W. Montague Cobb Skeletal Collection, the third largest in the U. S., with both my advisor and Dr. Rachel Watkins of American University. The Cobb Collection is absolutely unique and special for many reasons. It was originally collected and curated by the first African-American biological anthropologist, for whom the collection is named, and records indicate that the remains in the collection are almost entirely people of color, and from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Additionally, the collection is housed at and is the property of Howard University, an HBCU. While I had the honor of working there, I documented possible nutritional deficiencies in 75 individuals (e.g., rickets, enamel hypoplasia, cranial porosity) of and completed an exhaustive osteobiography of one individual. I presented those results at the departmental “Reports from the Field” that fall (Marcy S Weber and Jennifer Muller. “Nutritional Deficiency in 20th Century Washington, D. C.: Study and Osteobiography,” 2013, Department of Anthropology, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY).