Caitlin Schrein

Caitlin Schrein is a Human Origins Program Fellow. She has a B.A. in Environmental Biology with a concentration in Anthropology from Columbia University. As an undergraduate, she interned in the Vertebrate Paleontology Department at the American Museum of Natural History and completed an honors thesis on the morphological affinities of an extinct monkey species found in France and Romania. After graduation, she moved to the southwest to work at the Biosphere II Center in Arizona and then in the Education Department of the Arizona Science Center as a Programming and Outreach Specialist. She received her M.A. in Anthropology at Arizona State University where she began to focus her research on the fossil record of apes in Eurasia and Africa.  She has conducted field work in France, Greece, and, most recently, on the island of Rusinga in Lake Victoria, Kenya, where some of the oldest ape fossils have been discovered. Caitlin truly feels at home in Africa; she studied Kiswahili at Columbia and says she would live on Rusinga if she could only bring her three dogs with her. Caitlin’s research also includes computer-based modeling of ape skulls for stress and strain analysis and she will be using these skills to virtually reconstruct fossil specimens in the future. In addition to her paleoanthropological work, Caitlin is passionate about science education. She was twice a National Science Foundation Graduate Teaching Fellow, assisting science teachers in 5^th-8^th grade classrooms, and she has spent many years teaching at ASU and community college, as well as giving public lectures and coordinating educator workshops. Her doctoral research at ASU examines the relationship between exposure to human evolutionary biology education and students’ persistence in STEM (science-technology-engineering-math) programs and their decision-making about socioscientific issues, such as climate change, personal health and modern human diversity. As a Fellow of the Human Origins Program, Caitlin will assist with varied efforts to improve the public’s understanding of the science of human origins.