The Anthropology Department at Emory welcomes four new graduate students to the program this Fall. They come from diverse educational backgrounds and have exciting research that they will pursue in the coming years.

Bridget Hansen earned bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology and Classical Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her research focuses on how cultural beliefs and practices of mental illness and health interact with the neoliberalism of Euro-American systems of biomedicine and psychology in the Arabian Gulf countries. She has conducted research in Oman and other Gulf countries with a Fulbright Fellowship and has been awarded the Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation for her work at Emory. She was recently featured in Emory News as an entering graduate student with exciting research and great accomplishments.

AJ Jones earned the Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Princeton University. Her research interests include the topics of illness, disability, medicine, gender, and the body. Prior to coming to Emory, she researched the subjectivity and narratives of girls and women with Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition in which females are born with a partially or entirely missing X chromosome, rendering them infertile, among other physical effects. She hopes to continue and build upon this line of research at Emory.

Jordan Martin earned bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Psychology at Miami University. His research focuses on the proximate and ultimate bases of social behavior and relationships in human and non-human primates, particularly with the evolution and biological underpinnings of social personality traits, the evolutionary consequences of cooperative breeding, and the determinants and functional significance of affiliative and and attachment bonds. Prior to arriving at Emory, he spent a year conducting research in Vienna, and he is a Woodruff Scholar in the Laney Graduate School.

Erik Ringen earned the Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Washington State University. He is interested in comparative and quantitative approaches to understanding human behavior and health from an evolutionary perspective. While at Emory, he will focus on ingestive behavior and the natural history of human interactions with plant secondary compounds in food, medicine, and drug use. Prior to coming to Emory, he worked as a researcher with the Human Relations Area Files project at Yale University.