Lynn Copes
Research Training Intern
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution, USA
Lynn is from Minnesota, and just finished her junior year at Columbia University in New York, where she is majoring in anthropology. She is interested in studying human evolution and anatomy, and hopes to study paleopathology and paleoanthropology in graduate school. In New York she spends a lot of time at the American Museum of Natural History, but this summer, she is participating in the Research Training Program at the Smithsonian's NMNH, another fabulous museum. Her project involves comparing paleoenvironmental and paleoanthropological evidence to examine the reliability of environmental reconstructions used by anthropologists. She's gathering data on the stratigraphic levels at Olduvai and Turkana that contain paleoenvironmental indicators and examining whether these levels match up exactly with those containing hominin fossils and artifcats. When she's not studying bones and hominin fossils, Lynn loves teaching elementary school kids in an after-school program and reading mystery novels.