Anna J. Ragni, Ph.D.I am an assistant professor of biology at the University of Tampa where I research primate and hominin anatomy, locomotion, and development. I earned my PhD in Comparative Biology at the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History where I researched locomotor ontogeny and postcranial functional morphology in primates. After earning my degree, I was a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at California State University, Los Angeles, and a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. My graduate and early postdoctoral work used microComputed Tomography and geometric morphometrics to quantify how primate and mammal bones change through development in relation to locomotion, life history, and environment. My current work is focused on exploring functional correlations to bone anatomy and creating a biomechanical model of the ~3.2-million-year-old “Lucy” skeleton to simulate its locomotor capabilities and better understand the evolution of fossil hominin locomotion.
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