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WOMAN OF SCIENCE
Anthropology Professor Casts Aside Convention
By Kathy Strickland
Hannah Marsh believes it’s important to know where you come from. But her family tree has much deeper roots than your typical genealogy.
“You gotta know your relatives to understand yourself,” Hannah, an associate professor of Anthropology at UCM, tells her students when staging a “family reunion” in UCM’s Rolla F. Wood Building. She lays out casts of humans’ closest living relatives: the chimpanzee, followed by the gorilla and then the orangutan. “Comparing our teeth, comparing the size of our brains, comparing the orientations of our skeletons because we move differently. All of this is incredibly important in understanding who we are today and how these bones function for us the way they do.”
Hannah points out that, in humans, the leg bones are much longer than the arms, whereas chimpanzees’ arms and legs are similar in length because they use both to traverse the landscape. In contrast, she points to the arm bones of another ape, the gibbon, which are much longer than its legs because it moves by swinging through the trees. Instead of the long stride humans require to walk bipedally, other primates necessitate a longer arm span.
Students are able to handle the durable bone casts and examine them side by side. This would not have been possible without a donor-funded Opportunity Grant through the UCM Alumni Foundation. Hannah applied for and was awarded a $5,000 grant to purchase more than 620 bones to be used at every Anthropology course level, from Human Prehistory to Forensic Anthropology. In the past, the program had a bare-minimum bone collection, and students often had to compare and measure pictures of bones.
“You can show pictures all day, but it’s nothing like seeing it in person,” Hannah says, adding that the size of the Opportunity Grant was perfect for her needs, which exceeded the departmental budget but were not extensive enough to appeal to an institution like the National Science Foundation. “Having the casts in hand is going to be magical.”
The Opportunity Grant even allowed Hannah to offer a new course this fall called Human Osteology, where students “take a deep dive into how we grow, heal and vary through time and space.”
A World of Wonder
Hannah has always had an interest in the how and why of human history. Growing up the daughter of a geology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, she decided as a middle school student to follow in her father’s footsteps.
“I realized that as a science professor I could continuously research and expand all of our knowledge about how the universe functions in the past, the present and the future,” Hannah says. “It feels like not growing up because you get to wonder for the rest of your life.”
Throughout her undergraduate studies in anthropology and zoology, Hannah built a supportive network of colleagues and mentors. When she entered graduate school at a different university, however, she found herself alone. Her doctoral advisor discouraged her, but through drive, determination and the help of her previously established support group,
Hannah prevailed as the only female student of her cohort in her advisor’s lab to earn her degree and achieve the career she had always planned.
“I had people tell me things like, well, you know, it’s hard to find jobs like that. You’re not really going to enjoy it. You should think about other things,” Hannah recalls. “I just stuck with it no matter what people were saying.”
Now in her 10th year at UCM, Hannah says watching the faculty screening of “Picture a Scientist,” funded by another donor-funded Opportunity Grant, reminded her of her graduate school experience.
“I knew what the theme was, but I was unprepared,” she says of the impact the film had on her personally. “I realized I never dealt with how I was treated by my advisor in graduate school. … In a lot of documentaries, the people wearing white coats and working in the labs will be women, and the people they actually interview are men. Women need to give themselves permission to be heard.”
Hannah decided to speak openly about her experience as part of the panel discussion after the student screening of the documentary. Before taking students on a dig or to an industry conference, she and her colleagues have upfront conversations with students about reporting incidents of harassment, discrimination or anything that makes them feel unsafe.
“Reporting needs to be real,” she says. “It needs to be talked about, and people who are leaders need to take that seriously and offer reporting mechanisms early — before anything happens.”
Hannah is a role model for her students at UCM — especially women pursuing a degree in science. Leading by example, she strives to demystify science and students’ preconceived notion of what a scientist should be.
“What is science? It’s not this monumental, scary thing,” Hannah tells students. “Science wears pink pants and sparkly jewelry. Science is just a way of thinking about the world, and it comes in any package. Most of science actually doesn’t happen in a lab. Science can happen right here, right now.”
A woman of her word, Hannah walks the walk — and even dances it. She embodies the pink pants and is a competitive ballroom dancer — all while conducting leading research into cranial vault thickness and tooth size variation in Homo erectus and recent humans.
“Scientists aren’t all lab coats and stoicism,” she says. “Sometimes we get things wrong, but we can fix that by asking better questions, tweaking the directions we’re going, measuring better. … That’s the beauty of science, that you’re standing on the edge of that knowledge.”
