Erik Otárola-Castillo

Promoted to Associate Professor

Department of Anthropology

eoc@purdue.edu

Erik Otárola-Castillo completed a Ph.D. in anthropological science at Stony Brook University, a master’s degree in anthropology at Iowa State University, and his bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Stony Brook University. He joined Purdue’s faculty in 2015.

Otárola-Castillo is an archaeologist, human evolutionary biologist, and biostatistician. He specializes in evolution, ecology, and diversity of behavior in prehistoric and modern populations of hunter-gatherers. Additional interests include the effects that climate change, and variation of food-availability-and-distribution had on the diet of some of the first North American native populations.

As a biostatistician and computational anthropologist, he develops quantitative tools to answer questions in the context of the major dimensions of archaeological research: space, time, and form. To this end he develops and implements quantitative models of the human diet, 3D-morphometrics software, statistical software for zooarchaeologists, models of spatio-temporal statistics and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Otárola-Castillo’s work appears in journals within anthropology, archaeology, and more broadly in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and PLoS One by the Public Library of Science. He was invited to do a review of Bayesian approaches in the Annual Review of Anthropology 2018. Otárola-Castillo is recognized as an international authority with invitations to present at U.S. and international institutions. He currently directs the Laboratory for Computational Anthropology and Anthroinformatics (LCA).