Mark Jenike, associate professor of anthropology, has had a busy and productive year since joining the Lawrence faculty in September 2004. Like any first-year Lawrentian, he started with Freshman Studies. “Although the grading can be onerous,” he says, “I very much enjoy the class — the works, the students, the shared intellectual journey.”
In his own department, he teaches courses in Ecological Anthropology and Biological Anthropology, plus the Senior Research Seminar. “Just as leading a class populated by first-year students has its unique rewards, so does leading a class of seniors who are at the point in their intellectual growth when they are ready to demonstrate their ability to independently conceive a research question, design a study to implement it, and effectively communicate their findings to others,” he says.
The photo above illustrates a laboratory exercise from Biological Anthropology, in which Scott Blumenthal, ’07, is measuring the professor’s cranial breadth. The students take measurements of each other as a way to introduce the analysis of quantitative data, studying human variation, and foreshadowing the measurements they will take on fossil casts of extinct hominins and non-human primates.
Outside the classroom, Jenike serves on the committee for the Lawrence Fellows in the Liberal Arts and Sciences program and on a Task Force on Community Engagement. Outside the campus, he has had a number of opportunities to communicate his research interests to the wider community through public lectures and other presentations. In addition, he is principal investigator on the “Appleton West Food and Nutrition Project,” a pilot study undertaken in cooperation with individuals from the anthropology and sociology department at the University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley and from Appleton West High School that is studying issues of adolescent nutritional health and the origins of obesity. His students are conducting the part of the study that assesses the dietary behavior and nutritional culture at Appleton West.
Read more about Professor Jenike
View other faculty profiles from the president's annual report