Nina G. Jablonski
Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University
Photo credit: Georgina Hatt-Cook/BBC Horizon
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Nina G. Jablonski
Nina G. Jablonski is head and professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. She is an anthropologist and paleobiologist who studies the evolution of adaptations to the environment in nonhuman and human primates. In her paleontological and comparative anatomical research, she has worked to shed light on the nature of "successful" and "unsuccessful" anatomical and physiological adaptations to the environment through time, especially in the Old World primates. Her research comprises descriptive and functional studies of living and fossil primates and theoretical studies of aspects of primate and human not preserved in the fossil record. Many of these studies have involved long-term collaborations with scientists in east and south Asia, and in eastern Africa. In the last 15 years, she has been increasingly absorbed in studies of "unseen" aspects of human evolution, most notably, the evolution of human skin and skin color. Jablonski is a joint editor of the Cambridge Series in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology and an associate editor of Folia Primatologica. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the California Academy of Sciences. In April 2005, she was awarded one of first twelve Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowships ("Guggenheims for race") for her research on the evolution of human skin color. She was awarded the W.W. Howells Book Award of the American Anthropological Association for 2007 for her book, Skin: A Natural History (University of California Press, 2006).