Melanie Beasley
Melanie Beasley is an assistant professor at Purdue University where she directs the Bioanth Isotope Ecology Research Laboratory (BIER Lab). Melanie Beasley received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2016. From 2017-2019, she was a Haslam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville conducting research at the Forensic Anthropology Center.
Dr. Beasley’s work focuses broadly on human-environment interactions throughout the hominin lineage when the environment is influencing our evolutionary history, in the Holocene when humans are influencing the availability of prey resources, and in modern forensic contexts when the environment imprints meaningful geolocation information in biological tissues. She uses stable isotope geochemistry to connect humans and the environment they live in to understand changing climate, resource availability, and life history. The use of stable isotope geochemistry and the big data generated by such an analytical method in anthropology has only scratched the surface of what it can offer to the discipline.
