CWard

Personal

Bio

I am interested in the evolution of humans and our closest relatives, apes and monkeys. My research focuses on fossils from East and South Africa, primarily Kenya. I take a mechanical approach to the interpretation of the postcranial skeleton, and use these principles to reconstruct the behavior of extinct animals. My overall research goal is to understand human origins.

One of my current areas of research involves studying a great radiation of apes that lived in the early Miocene (about 18 million years ago), out of which came human ancestors. I also work on interpreting the skeletons of the earliest known hominin fossils, Australopithecus afarensis and A. anamensis. I study not only their locomotion, but am interested in their jaw structure and patterns of body size and canine sexual dimorphism as well. I am particularly in on the functional anatomy of the spines of modern and fossil humans, apes and monkeys. I am currently collaborating with orthopedic surgeons and an engineer to use three dimensional image analysis and finite element modeling to study the spinal mechanics of modern patients with particular spinal disorders. I am also embarking on a new collaborative research project to study the effects of mechanical loads on the ontogeny of joint size and shape under the chondral modeling theory.

I teach anatomy to undergraduate, medical, physical and occupational therapy students. I also advise graduate students, in the past through the Department of Anthropology, and soon through the Integrative Anatomy group in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences.

 

URL

http://web.missouri.edu/~wardcv/

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