Jeroen B Smaers (PI).
Jeroen is interested in detailing the patterns and processes that characterize vertebrate brain evolution (with a particular focus on mammals and humans). He’s further interested in phylogenetic comparative methodology, brain mapping, and macroevolutionary morphology. His research is currently funded by the NSF, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Leakey Foundation.
Ashley N. Parks (PhD student; JBS advisor)
David R. Vanier (PhD student; JBS advisor). David is interested in the macroevolution of the hippocampus as it relates to navigation in primates and bats. He investigates changes in connectivity underlying the integration of hippocampal maps into a generalized network for manipulating mental representations. His work is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Nicolás Wiggenhauser (PhD student; JBS advisor). Nicolás is interested in the evolution of cortical folding in mammals and its effect on cognition and environmental adaptation. He is also interested in cytoarchitectonics, allometry, geometric morphometrics, and phylogenetic comparative methodology. His research is currently funded by a Doctoral Fulbright scholarship.
Carrie S. Mongle (PhD student; JBS Committee member). Carrie is working to develop new statistical models to understand the structure of species variation in the fossil record. She is also interested in hominin phylogenetics, as well as establishing links between micro and macroevolution. Her research is currently funded by the NSF and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Abigail Nishimura (PhD student; JBS committee member). Abigail is interested in the functional morphology and evolution of the cervical vertebral column in mammals. Her research is currently funded by The Leakey Foundation.
Dorien de Vries (Phd student; JBS committee member). Dorien is interested in the post-dispersal evolutionary history of primates and rodents in Afro-Arabia and South America, and how these trends differ or mirror each other between the two mammalian groups and continents through time. Dorien’s research is currently funded by the Leakey Foundation.
Max Kerney (PhD student, Anglia Ruskin University, UK; JBS comittee member). Max is interested in understanding the macroevolutionary causes of primate brain size diversity through the use of phylogenetic comparative methods. He is also interested in cognitive science and in research best-practices.
Sharon Doyle (PhD student; JBS committee member)
Alexander D. Průcha.(PhD student, The George Washington Univerity; JBS committee member). Alexander is interested in reconstructing the mode and tempo of ape and human facial skeletal evolution, using novel morphometric and evolutionary modeling methods. In particular, he is interested in how the facial forms of Miocene hominoids inform predictions of morphology in the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.
Vincy Mathew (Undergraduate Research Assistant). Vincy is a pre-med student at Stony Brook University majoring majoring in Biology. She’s interested in the correlation that has been observed between the volume of different cerebellar lobules of primates and their level of higher cognitive functions. She’s also interested in comparing cerebellar volumes across different primate species to understand their evolutionary pattern.
Karthik Nair (Undergraduate Research Assistant). Karthik is a junior at Stony Brook University majoring in Biology with a minor in Anthropology. Within the lab, he takes area measurements of cerebellar lobules of multiple species of primates in order to analyze how the size of these lobules can be connected to general primate intelligence.
