Melissa Torquato
Please join me in congratulating Melissa Torquato, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, for being a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowships.
Melissa, a first-year master's student, was one of 2,000 proposals selected from an original pool of 13,000 students. She is one of 11 Purdue students to receive this honor. She currently explores the question, why did humans stop living as hunters and gatherers and become farmers, as she is interested in how recent the development of farming from hunter-gatherer societies has impacted the course of human history.
Melissa serves as a Research Assistant in the Laboratory for Computational Anthropology and Anthroinformatics (LCA), where she is involved in developing new methods and protocols to answer questions about anthropological questions. Melissa's area of specialization is biological anthropology and her adviser iDr. Erik Otárola-Castillo, Assistant Professor of anthropology.
Congratulations, Melissa!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts