Welcoming new faculty members in July 2022

Although Alicia Hawkins came to UTM in 2021 as a limited term lecturer, we are thrilled to welcome her as a tenured Associate Professor in Ontario Archaeology this year! Alicia is an archaeologist with over twenty-five years' experience working on Indigenous sites in Ontario and beyond. Her current community-based projects include: a study of communities of practice in pottery fabrication in the Lower Great Lakes-St. Lawrence, and reimagining the care of Indigenous archaeological belongings/artifacts in northeastern Ontario. She served on the executive of the Canadian Archaeological Association and is the former president of the Ontario Archaeological Society. Alicia will be chairing our newly created UTM Anthropology Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee this year.

Frank Wendt joins the Forensic Science Program as an Assistant Professor in Forensic Genomics. Frank received a Ph.D. in Biomedical Science (Molecular Genetics) from the Graduate School of Biomedical Science, University of North Texas Health Science Center, in 2018. He comes to UTM having held the Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow (National Institute for Mental Health) at the Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine & VA CT Healthcare system. Frank has a strong background in forensic science and broad experience in the fields of genomics and genetic epidemiology, with publications in top-tiered journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, and Nature Communications. He is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American Society of Human Genetics. We’re excited to see Frank joining our Forensic Science Program, and for him to bring fresh perspectives to the Program.

Monica Ramsey received her Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Texas at Austin and joins UTM as a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Prior to this, she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2017-2020) and a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the department of Anthropology, University of Toronto (2015-2017). Monica’s research explores the cultural and environmental implications of plant resource selection and how human activities impacted the intensification of plant resource selection and how human activities impacted the intensification of plant food production. She is the author of papers in some of the top journals within archaeology (The Holocene, American Antiquity, Quaternary International, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Science), as well as multidisciplinary journals (PNAS, PLoS One). Monica will establish a state-of-the-art research lab at UTM that uses an array of palaeoethnobotanical methods, including macrobotanical and microbotanical approaches (phytolith, starch, starch spherulites and microcharcoal).