Shannon McFarlin

Dr. McFarlin is a biological anthropologist and hard tissue biologist with interests in understanding the factors that shape variation in growth, development and life history in humans and other primates, as well as what skeletal tissues can reveal about life history evolution in the past. She approaches this through a program of interdisciplinary and collaborative research based both in the laboratory and the field, centered particularly around several wild great ape and baboon populations that have been the focus of long-term observational study. This research integrates developmental, morphological, behavioral, ecological, and other datasets collected from wild primate populations with detailed investigations of their naturally accumulated skeletal remains, to generate a more comprehensive understanding of life history evolution in primates.

Besides her appointment in Anthropology, Dr. McFarlin is a faculty member in GW's Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.