The Department of Anthropology is pleased to welcome this year’s cohort of graduate students. Each of these individuals comes with a diverse background and noteworthy experiences, contributing to the University of Georgia's ongoing commitment to academic excellence. Their arrival further enriches our community with interdisciplinary knowledge and perspectives, strengthening our scholarly environment and providing even more reasons to take pride in being Georgia Dawg! Sarieh Amiribeirami Sarieh Amiribeirami is a recipient of the Presidential Graduate Fellow Award, UGA’s most prestigious fellowship award for incoming doctoral students. She has a BA in Archaeology from Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamadan, Iran and a MA in Archaeozoology from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, where she has worked as a freelance archaeozoologist since graduating. Her research interests focus on understanding the dynamics of human-animal interactions, particularly in the Zagros Mountains in Iran, through archaeozoology and stable isotope analysis to explore the origins of animal domestication and husbandry. Hannah Boone Hannah Boone comes to the department with a BA in Anthropology from Elon University, and a MA in Applied Anthropology from Oregon State University. As a highly competitive PhD student, she received the Doctoral Fellow Award from the UGA Graduate School. As an environmental anthropologist, Boone is interested in the intersection of cognitive and environmental anthropology to understand how people’s ways of knowing impact conservation decision-making. Sophie Forbes Sophie Forbes graduated summa cum laude with honors from the University of Georgia with bachelor's degrees in Anthropology and Geology with minors in Classical and Comparative Cultures. As a Double Dawg student, her research focuses on coastal archaeology of the American Southeast. Her thesis research utilizes geochemical techniques, namely stable isotope sclerochronology, to understand human-environment interactions of the Indigenous and Post-Contact/enslaved populations on the Georgia coast. She is currently a teaching assistant with the Department of Anthropology. Bronwyn Matlick Bronwyn Matlick, an alumna of the University of Georgia, earned a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and currently serves as a Site File Technician for the Georgia Archaeological Site File at the UGA Laboratory of Archaeology. As a Double Dawg student, she has participated in archaeological excavations along the coasts of Georgia, USA, Hungary, and Ireland. These experiences have informed her thesis research, which focuses on the archaeology of the North American Southeast, specifically examining Late Archaic ceramic technology on the Georgia Coast. In addition to her research and technical responsibilities, Matlick also contributes to the Department of Anthropology as a teaching assistant. Jesus Alejandro Najera Medellin Alejandro Najera Medellin’s passion lies in the conservation of seahorses and their relatives and is researching sustainable practices for their conservation and the socioeconomic improvement of coastal communities and artisanal fishers in Mexico. His experiences include a wide variety of research related to the ecology of the Chihuahuan Desert, distribution and richness of fungi in the Sierra Tarahumara, and biotechnology of edible fungi. He holds a B.A. in Biology from the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and a M.S. in Chemical-Biological Sciences at Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. In recognition of his accomplishments and potential, he received UGA’s Presidential Graduate Fellow Award and the Fulbright-García Robles scholarship. Olivier Pilette Olivier Pilette is a doctoral student specializing in anthropological archaeology with a focus on the socio-cultural interactions and complexities of ancient populations in eastern North America, and a recipient of the UGA Presidential Graduate Fellow Award. Pilette brings over five years of experience working in diverse archeological contexts in Québec and is also on the board of the Québec Association of Archaeologists. He holds a BA from the Université de Montréal and Université Laval. For his Master’s research at Université Laval he explored the social aspects of mobility among hunter-gatherer communities in the southern Laurentians region within the drainages of the Lièvre, Rouge, and Petite Nation rivers. His PhD research explores the complex relationships between late Woodland and early historic mobile boreal groups and sedentary societies in southern Ontario and Québec. Dominique Valentine Dominique Valentine is a PhD student in the Integrative Conservation (ICON) and Anthropology program, joining with a Bachelor of Science from Fordham University and a Master of Science from the University of Michigan. She is interested in Environmental Justice and Wildlife Ecology and intends to study how human communities' continual growth and expansion impact the surrounding wildlife population and ecosystems. She currently has a research assistantship with the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
