Undergraduate Ethnobiologist Award Winner for 2017

Hope Loiselle is a junior at the University of Maryland studying anthropology and archaeology. Her research interests include zooarchaeology, historical ecology, and island and coastal archaeology. She hopes to pursue graduate studies in archaeology with a regional focus in the Pacific and study past human interactions with marine ecosystems. Currently, she is completing her honors thesis under the guidance of Torben Rick at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, conducting a zooarchaeological analysis of small cetacean bone from Seaside, Oregon. She is also working with Miguel Vilar, lead scientist of National Geographic’s Genographic Project, to study the peopling of Micronesia from a genetic perspective. She studied abroad in New Zealand last semester, where her passion for Pacific archaeology first developed. Her love of zooarchaeology started as a sophomore when she began working in the UMD Zooarchaeology Lab under the guidance of George Hambrecht and Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman. Hope is also the president of the undergraduate Anthropology Student Association.