Current Board of Directors

Dana Lepofsky
President
(March 2009–March 2011)

Dana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia. She is a paleoethnobotanist who is particularly interested in the social and ecological impacts of human interactions with their environment, but likes anything to do with the ancient use of plants. Dana has conducted research in Oceania and the Pacific Northwest of North America. Her current research program in British Columbia brings together researchers from several disciplines and from academic and First Nations communities to investigate various issues related to the development of complex hunter-gatherers. She examines these issues at varying spatial scales, from the household to the region. Dana is committed to making archaeological work more accessible to the public and all her projects have a large outreach component. [Link to detailed biography]

Justin M. Nolan
President Elect/Vice-President
(March 2009–March 2011)

Justin M. Nolan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. His research interests include the perpetuation of Western Cherokee knowledge, classification, and use of native flora and fauna of the Ozark Mountain region. As a project coordinator for Cherokee Nation’s cultural conservation programs, Nolan is examining the survivorship of the Cherokee language in rural Northeast Oklahoma through projects designed to safeguard natural resources which constitute the basis for traditional Cherokee foodways, health beliefs, and expressive cultural practices. Since joining the anthropology faculty at UA, Nolan has examined vernacular folklore in the Ouachita Mountains, medicinal plant knowledge in the Missouri Ozarks, historic hunting and fishing technology in North Louisiana, and ethnic-specific foodways in the Arkansas Delta. [Link to detailed biography]

Cynthia Fowler
Secretary (March 2009–March 2012)

Cynthia Fowler is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Public Health at Wofford College. She is interested in multi-species interactions between people, plants, and animals at the local level and their links to regional- and global-level phenomena. Her teaching practices combine transmitting scholarly information with advocacy of human rights and ecosystems health. She has participated in interdisciplinary research in ethnobiology, ecosystems health, and medical anthropology, in Southeast Asia, Oceania, the U.S. South, and Brazil. Her current focus is on the critical study of fire science and the use of fire to manage landscapes. Cultural identity and natural resource management in Kodi (Sumba, Indonesia) was the focus of her doctoral research and continues to capture most of her attention. [Link to detailed biography]

Steve Wolverton
Treasurer (March 2008–March 2011)

Steve is an environmental scientist and archaeologist specializing in paleozoology of North America during the Holocene. He is assistant professor in environmental archaeology and conservation paleozoology at the University of North Texas, Department of Geography. His interests span ecology, paleoecology of North America, environmental archaeology, paleozoology, and conservation biology. His recent research focuses on white-tailed deer and black bear biology and the use of datasets from zooarchaeology and paleontology to address modern issues in conservation biology. In addition, Steve has interests in analytical chemistry and has on-going research in artifact residue analysis including fatty-acid and protein residues from pottery. [Link to detailed biography]

Rainer Bussmann
Board Member (March 2008–March 2011)

Rainer is head of William L. Brown Center (WLBC) at Missouri Botanical Garden, and Curator of Economic Botany. Originally a vegetation ecologist, he focuses now on the interface between plant use, conservation and resource management. He held university appointments as Assistant Professor at University of Bayreuth (Germany), as Associate Professor and Scientific Director of Lyon Arboretum at University of Hawaii, and as Research Fellow at University of Texas, Austin, and has taught a wide variety of classes in the US, Germany, Africa and Latin America, using English, German, and Spanish as teaching languages. His research interests focus on medicinal plants, neglected crops, wild crop relatives and traditional crop varieties, Seed and Germination Ecology, Natural Resource Management, International law in relation to Intellectual Property Rights, Ecology and Environment, Plant Ecology and Regeneration Ecology, with current projects in Peru, Ecuador, Iran, India, Nepal and Kenya.

Marsha Quinlan
Board Member (March 2010–March 2013)

Marsha Quinlan is a sociocultural anthropologist who works largely at the intersection of medical anthropology and ethnobotany. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. Her fieldwork has been in North and South America and the Caribbean, with most of her research on the medicine of a largely-horticulturalist community in Dominica. She recently began working with Lummi in Washington's Puget Sound on USDA-funded research on ways to incorporate plants from their traditional diet (and appropriate substitutes) as an anti-diabetic strategy.  

Kitty Emery
Board Member (March 2009–March 2012)

Kitty Emery is an environmental archaeologist interested in human use of animals and landscapes in the ancient Maya world and beyond. She is Associate Curator for Environmental Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History and an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida . Her early studies examined human-animal-landscape interactions during periods of societal stress such as first Colonial contact (at the Belize sites of Lamanai and Tipu) and the Maya 'collapse' (at the Petexbatun sites of Guatemala). Recent research has combined soil studies, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology in an interdisciplinary study of the ancient economics of natural resource use at the Guatemalan site of Motul de San Jose. In her current work she is concentrating on zooarchaeological evidence of ancient Maya hunting and forest management as reflected in archaeological deposits across the entire Maya region. As part of this study, she has recently become fascinated by modern Maya medicinal and ritual curation of animal bone and other products and is using this information to reconsider archaeological interpretations of animal bone use and discard. [Link to detailed biography]

John Tuxill
Board Member (March 2008–March 2011)

John Tuxill is Assistant Professor with Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University, where he teaches ethnobotany, applied conservation biology, and environmental studies. His research centers on understanding how small-scale agrarian households manage different aspects of biological diversity—from crop varieties to habitats and landscape patterns. He is particularly interested in how agricultural biodiversity is shaped by social, economic, and ecological changes in farmers’ lives, and the implications of those changes for conservation. John conducts field research on these themes in collaboration with Yucatec Maya communities in central Yucatan, Mexico. Additional contributors to this work include the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Avanzados-Unidad Merida. John has taught undergraduate and graduate field studies in Yucatan and the Ecuadorian Andes, and has additional research and teaching interests in highland Southern Mexico, southwest China, and the Pacific Northwest.

T. Abe Lloyd 
Board Member (March 2010-March 2013)

Abe is a graduate student in ethnoecology at the Univeristy of Victoria in Victoria, BC. His academic interest is in traditional systems of land and resource management. He is currently writing his M.Sc. thesis on the historic practice of  cultivating the edible roots of Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii) by the Kwakwaka'wakw of northern Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland coast of British Columbia. Abe is exploring how traditional management may have enhanced the productivity and palability of silverweed roots by conducting qualitative interviews and quantitative field and lab experiments. After completing his masters degree, Abe intends to continue studying food producing ecosystems that were hisotrically managed by the First People of coastal British Columbia. His career goals are to conduct research that will help revitalize fading food traditions and to explore the sustainabile potential of wild foods in a modern diet. While Abe's childhood and graduate research have been spent in NW North America, he has lived many places throughout the US and has done ethnobotanical work internationally in Nepal and Tibet with the Peace Corps (2003-04) and the Missouri Botanical Garden (2009). He is a passionate forager of wild edible plants, mushrooms, and animals and tries to regularly incorporate them into his diet.