People

Maia Bukhsianidze is a Principal Researcher at the Georgian National Museum. Her research focuses on evolution and systematics of Bovidae. Neogen and Quaternary faunas of the Caucasus. She has done extensive field work in the country of Georgia, including relocating existing sites and finding new ones. During 2005-2015, she undertook major curation efforts for the fossil vertebrate and modern osteological collections of the Georgian National Museum and the Institute of the Paleobiology of...

Carter Chain is a third-year student in the mathematics PhD program. He has been a member of the AMAAZE team since the summer of 2019, working on the classification problem. He is interested in data science, machine learning, and partial differential equations.

Reed Coil is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Nazarbayev University in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan. His research focuses broadly on reconstructing hominin behavior at Paleolithic archaeological sites, which includes disentangling hominin and carnivore competition and space use through spatial analyses and taphonomy/zooarchaeology. Reed is currently part of the international team of scientists working at the Paleolithic site of Dmanisi, Georgia, where he is...

Joscha Diehl is a junior professor of Stochastic Analysis at the University of Greifswald, Germany. He is mainly interested in applying algebraic methods to topics in stochastic analysis, statistics, and data science.
 

Matt Edling is the Lab and Collections Manager for the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that he was a Collections Technician II for the Science Museum of Minnesota and a Museum Technician for the Smithsonian Insititution’s Museum of Natural History. Matt oversees the Evolutionary Anthropology Laboratory where the collection of experimentally broken bone fragments used in AMAAZE research are curated. He also provides educational and research support to students and...

William Leeb is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research interests are in applied and computational harmonic analysis, statistical signal processing, high-dimensional PCA, and machine learning. He is particularly interested in applications to image processing problems arising from cryoelectron microscopy.

From 2015 to 2018, he was a postdoc in Amit Singer's research group in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics...

Risa Luther is a Ph.D student in (biological) anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines the process of tooth wear over the course of primate life spans in order to better understand how patterns of crown surface wear inform our understanding of function and phylogeny.    

Annie Melton is a Ph. D candidate in anthropological archaeology at the University of Minnesota. Broadly speaking, her research focuses on the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition and the stone tool technological changes which took place during this period. More specifically, she seeks to understand cultural transmission processes among prehistoric populations and how archaeologists observe them via the stone tool record.

Riley O’Neill is a first year Ph.D. student in the University of Minnesota applied mathematics program. His research interests include computer vision, 3D object feature analysis, automated mass scale phenotypic and genotyping, differential geometry and topology, machine learning, and mathematical physics. He has worked with the AMAAZE consortium since 2018 on geometric invariants and bone fragment refitting.

Justin Pargeter, Assistant Professor at New York University, is a paleoanthropologist who uses archaeological approaches to answer questions about human biocultural evolution. He answers these questions by tracking the archaeological record’s relationships between stone tool technology, cognition, and environmental change. His career focus has been on investigations of sub-Saharan Africa’s ancient hunter-gatherers through experimental archaeology, stone tool analyses, and the recovery of new...

Samantha Porter is a digital imaging specialist with Liberal Arts Technologies and Innovation Services (LATIS) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota in 2019. Her dissertation research used 3D scanning and quantitative analysis of stone tool technology to investigate the social relationships between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans in the period just prior to Neanderthal extinction.

Since 2017, she has run...

Michael Ruddy is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Data Institute at the University of San Francisco. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Nonlinear Algebra group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. His research interests lie in applied algebraic and differential geometry and data science. In particular he is interested in using geometric tools to study objects represented by continuous, discrete, or noisy data and connections to...

Cheri Shakiban received her Ph.D. in 1979 from Brown University in the Formal Calculus of Variations.   She is a professor of mathematics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she has been a faculty member since 1983, and where she served as the chair of the mathematics department for eight years (1996-2004).  She also served as an associate director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota (IMA)  for 9 years (2006-2015).   In...

Martha Tappen is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota. As a paleoanthropologist, her research focuses on the evolution of human behavior especially human-animal interactions, archaeological site formation, the adoption of meat-eating and spread out of Africa. She has done extensive excavation and analysis of the Dmanisi Homo erectus site in Georgia, focusing on bone accumulating mechanisms and modification by hominins, carnivores and natural processes.

Rob Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Carleton College.  He and his students joined the AMAAZE team in Fall 2020.   Rob received his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 2013 and is interested in applied and computational mathematics.  He especially loves leading undergraduate research projects. 

Gilbert Tostevin, Rotating Director of AMAAZE, is a Paleolithic archaeologist who uses the quantitative study of stone tools, including the three-dimensional analysis and modeling of core reduction sequences, to learn about prehistoric hominin behavior. He received his Ph.D in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2000. Dr. Tostevin is interested in the exploration and testing of new analytical techniques for understanding stone tool variability through the analysis of 3D models of...

Christoph von Tycowicz heads the research group for geometric data analysis and processing at Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB). He received his Ph.D. in mathematics (with highest honors) in 2014 from Freie Universität Berlin and his diploma degree in computer science (with distinction) in 2008 from Hochschule Bremen - University of Applied Science. He is a faculty member of the Berlin Mathematics Research Center MATH+ and the Einstein Center for Mathematics Berlin ECMath.

Christoph's research aims...

Anthony Yezzi is the Julian T. Hightower Chair in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He also leads the Laboratory of Computational Computer Vision.

His research interests fall broadly within the fields of image processing and computer vision. In particular he is interested in curve and surface evolution theory and partial differential equation techniques as they apply to topics within these fields (such as segmentation, image...