Rick Potts

Rick Potts is a paleoanthropologist and directs the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. After receiving his Ph.D. in biological anthropology at Harvard University in 1982, he taught at Yale before joining the Smithsonian in 1985. Potts’s current research investigates Earth’s environmental dynamics and the processes leading to novel adaptations. His ideas about the significance of environmental instability in human evolution have stimulated wide attention and new research in Earth sciences, paleontology, and experimental and computational biology. Bridging across many research disciplines, Potts’s field projects are located in the East African Rift and in southern and northern China. Potts is curator of the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins, and is author of the companion book What Does It Mean To Be Human? (National Geographic, 2010)
E-mail: pottsr@si.edu