Melissa Torquato
Please join me in congratulating Melissa Torquato, a first year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, for being a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFP).
Melissa’s proposal, was one of 2,000 selected from an original pool of 13,000. She is one of 11 Purdue students to receive this honor. She currently explores the question: why do we farm? She is interested in how the development of farming from hunter-gatherer societies has impacted the course of human evolution.
Melissa is a research assistant in the Laboratory for Computational Anthropology and Anthroinformatics (LCA), where she is involved in developing new methods and protocols to answer anthropological questions. Melissa's area of specialization is biological and computational anthropology and her advisor iDr. Erik Otárola-Castillo, assistant professor of anthropology.
Congratulations, Melissa!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts