Faculty and Researcher Affiliates
ROSETTA blends the experience, talents, and intellectual contributions of humanities and social science scholars.
Sorin Adam Matei, Professor of Human-Communication Technology Interaction, Assistant Vice President for Partnerships, (College of Liberal Arts), is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in creating team science and digital humanities projects that straddle multiple domains, including military history and contemporary social groups. He is the founder of the ROSETTA initiative.
Ian Lindsay (Anthropology) is an archaeologist studying Bronze Age fortified landscapes in the Armenian Highlands. As co-director of the satellite imagery-based monitoring team, Caucasus Heritage Watch, Lindsay publishes extensively on geospatial methods and teaches GIS courses and domestic and international workshops for social science scholars. He is the ROSETTA faculty coordinator.
Daniel Aliaga (Computer Science) is co-founder of Purdue’s Computer Graphics and Visualization Laboratory. Dr. Aliaga has worked on urban modeling, design, and simulation projects over the last decade.
Cassie Apuzzo (Anthropology, graduate student affiliate)
Elham J. Barezi (Rosen Center for Research Computing/IPAI)
Ali Bramson (Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences) is a planetary scientist who studies processes that shape the surfaces of planets. She uses techniques in radar remote sensing to non-invasively probe structures in the subsurface, such as buried ice on Mars, subsurface lava flows on the Moon, ice-volcano interactions on Earth, and the near-surface environment at sites of archaeological interest in Indiana and elsewhere. Bramson is involved in active NASA spacecraft missions and has been involved in studies administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to shape future exploration of our Solar System.
Elizabeth Brite (Anthropology) is an archaeologist studying the pre-modern cultures of Central Asia. Her work applies multimodal STEM approaches including paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and geospatial analysis to examine the role of the environment in major sociopolitical events of world history, such as the Arab and Mongol conquests.
Michele Buzon (Anthropology) is a bioarchaeologist who excavates and analyzes skeletal remains from archaeological sites in order to address questions related to the biocultural effects of sociopolitical change in the ancient Nile Valley.
Kory Cooper (Anthropology) studies innovation and culture change among Arctic, Subarctic, and Northwest Coast Hunter-Gatherers, and the adoption of trade metal in these regions following contact with Europeans. His work often uses GIS and landscape survey research.
Melba Crawford is the Nancy Uridil and Frank Bossu Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering.
Ayman Habib is the Thomas A. Page Professor of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. He is also the co-director of the Civil Engineering Center for Applications of UAS for a Sustainable Environment (CE-CAUSE) and the associate director of the Joint Transportation Research Program. His research focuses on ensuring the geo-spatial accuracy of multi-sensor/multi-platform/multi-date remote sensing data.
Joseph Hupy (School of Aviation and Transportation Technology)
Jinha Jung (Civil and Construction Engineering)
Stacy Lindshield (Anthropology) is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of Assirik Chimpanzee Research at Niokolo-Koba National Park in Senegal, West Africa. Her research sits at the intersections of primate behavior, ecology, and environmental sustainability. She uses GIS and remote sensing to measure environment at site and landscape levels.
Anawar Mohamed (Anthropology, graduate student affiliate)
Sotiris Nousias (Computer Science)
Erik Otarola-Castillo (Anthropology) is an archaeological statistician studying the evolution of human foraging, adaptation, and technological change. His research combines experimental design, geospatial analysis, Bayesian inference, machine learning, and 2D and 3D morphometrics to examine archaeological evidence of human behavior. He has developed widely used computational tools, including the geomorphand GUImorph R packages, and teaches courses and workshops on statistics, spatial modeling, and quantitative methods in archaeology.
Originally trained as an archaeologist, Lynn Parrish is a philosopher with special interests in social and political theory, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of art and architecture. I teach a wide variety of undergraduate courses in these areas. When I’m not in the classroom, you are likely to find me in Greece, Italy, or Turkey, where I continue to explore ancient ritual activities in the context of their built environments.
Nick Rauh (Classics, retired), professor emeritus, is a classicist and archaeologist, and an expert in the Eastern Mediterranean trade and economic exchanges at the cusp of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. His work on Cilicia involved large-scale GIS and landscape archeological methods, including remote sensing. Rauh continues to work with Günder Varinlioğlu of Mimar Sinan University (Istanbul) at the Boğsak Archaeological Survey Project in Boğsak (Silifke) Turkey, ongoing since 2010.
Dharmendra Saraswat (Agricultural and Biological Engineering)
Ben Schoville (Anthropology) is an archaeologist studying early modern human origins and water security in the Kalahari Desert. His research and teaching combines archaeology, geospatial analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to examine human-water interaction in arid environments. His work using geospatial methods to understand behavioral adaptations to challenging environments through time has been published in Science, Nature, PLOS ONE, and the Journal of Human Evolution.
George Takahashi (RCAC Envision Center)
Dan Triplett (School of Applied and Creative Computing)
Günder Varinlioğlu (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul) has directed the Boğsak Archaeological Survey in southern Turkey since 2010. Her research focuses on rural landscapes, architecture, and the building industry in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages. Among her scholarly interests is the application of new technologies in archaeological survey and the impact of informatics in the analysis and interpretation of cultural landscapes.