Achievement

To understand how functional activity influences bone development, IGERT student David Green is working with an IGERT faculty member (Richmond) and a developmental biologist at the Medical College of Georgia (Hamrick) using a mouse development model. Green found that shoulder muscle size and skeletal shape develop differently in response to exercise involving climbing compared with exercise on running treadmills. This research, which improves our ability to interpret function in the human fossil record has been awarded two doctoral dissertation research awards: one from NSF and one from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Preliminary results were presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. David Green was awarded the 2009 Earnest A. Hooton Award for outstanding student research for this work.