Author: Amber Cooper                    Major: Anthropology

Amber Cooper and a Cribriform Plate Segmentation

I have always been interested in primates since I plan to research early human evolution in the future. This immediately led me to my mentor, Dr. Claire Terhune, in my freshman year, when I joined her lab, called the Anatomy and Morphometrics Lab. Through my experiences at this lab, I decided I wanted my Honors thesis to focus on primates and their anatomy. Therefore, my research focuses on cribriform plate diversity in primates. To the anatomical laymen, the cribriform plate is the concave structure in the skull that houses the olfactory bulb, which is essential for the smell. The reason why I decided on this structure because it was highly neglected in primate research into smell, though the sense of smell itself also tends to take a back burner in favor of research on vision. Though it is a literary and movie classic, I wanted to research the “underdog” that is the cribriform plate and to what degree there are changes in smell between lemurs and lorises and apes and monkeys. That is what led me down the path of the primate cribriform plate, I wanted to research something that was not focused on by the academic community.

From this, I investigated how smell relates to behavior, and I researched this through the functional associations of diet, activity patterns, and social structure. Some of these functional associations, such as the social structure of some primate groups, are quite complex, and this provides a challenge to how to classify some primate species that behave interpersonally. Though, through arduous research into primate social structure studies, I was able to compile enough data to infer the social structure of the primates that I am looking at. Another challenge that I faced was how to separate the cribriform plate from the digital 3D scans of the primate skulls. This was where my wonderful mentor helped dramatically since they helped me learn about the program that I am using, Avizo, and helped me with the inner intricacies of these complicated programs. My mentor was not the only one who helped me with this challenge, since her graduate student, Caitlin Yoakum, also helped me with other minor problems when my mentor could not. These people were invaluable in helping me overcome some of these challenges and enable me to learn new skills that I can take into my future academic career.

Besides the immense help from my mentor and her student, we also planned on having me go to a biological anthropology conference once my research is complete next year. This is an extraordinary experience for me to advance my anthropological knowledge. Not only can I present my research to my academic peers, but I can also discover other academic research. By going to the conference, I can also better explain to peers how my research provides real-world applications since I can use real examples in-person, on how much people tend to overlook their sense of smell. I can collaborate with my peers and reveal how much people have a tendency to rely on their vision to interact with the world. Therefore, this experience will enhance my thesis, because if I ever want to expand this research in the future, I would be able to connect my discoveries from the conference to my thesis and develop it more. To conclude, the experiences that I have had with research so far have only bolstered my love for research and my commitment to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology after I graduate.