ASHB Annual General Meeting
The AGM is usually incorporated into the Annual Scientific Conference.

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Agenda
The ordinary business of the Annual General Meeting is as follows:

• to confirm the minutes of the last preceding Annual General Meeting and of any general meeting held since that meeting
• to receive from the Executive Committee the Annual Report and statement of Annual Accounts for the preceding financial year
• to determine the entrance fee and annual subscription
• to elect the officers of the ASHB committee and confirm the election of the ordinary Executive Committee members.
  

Meet the Committee

Alison Behie

President

Alison Behie is an Associate Professor, Deputy Head of School, and Head of Biological Anthropology at The Australian National University. Alison’s research broadly focuses on how and why humans and other primates adapt in the face of severe environmental change. Her primate research has explored the impact of a hurricane on howler and spider monkeys in Belize and the impact of logging and habitat fragmentation on endangered primates in Vietnam and Cambodia. She is also currently an ARC DECRA fellow exploring how exposure to natural disasters may impact behavioural adaptations in monkeys and lemurs on an evolutionary timescale. Alison hopes to use the results of these projects to help make more informed conservation plans in the future. With regards to humans, she is interested in understanding how prenatal and early life stress impact the health and development of children. In addition to her role at ANU, Alison is also the volunteer ACT state coordinator for the Jane Goodall Institute Australia’s Roots and Shoots program.

David Coall

Vice President

Varsha Pillbrow

Secretary

Varsha Pilbrow is an academic in the department of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on dental palaeoanthropology and skeletal biology. With the support of grants from the Leakey Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Sciences, the National Science Foundation, USA, NHMRC and ARC, Varsha’s research is lab-based and has taken her to museums in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America; fossil hominid localities in Tanzania, South Africa and India; and archaeological sites in the Republic of Georgia. Her palaeoanthropological research helps to understand the processes governing the diversification of populations into species and subspecies by using dental models from extant apes to address questions of speciation and evolutionary diversification in fossil hominids. Her bioarchaeological research uses ancient skeletal remains to address questions of human movement and migration with regards to demography, health, diet, pathology and social identity. Her teaching focus is on human topographic anatomy and she supervises research higher degree students in biological anthropology.

Justyna Miszkiewicz 

Treasurer

Dr Justyna Miszkiewicz is an ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra. Justyna specialises in hard tissue histology which she applies to biological anthropology questions in skeletal biology and bioarchaeology. She is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Brisbane; and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.

Melandri Vlok

Social Media Representative

Dr Melandri Vlok is an Assistant Research Fellow in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Otago. Melandri specialises in palaeopathology/ bioarchaeology and researches the implications for migration and trade on the presence of infectious and nutritional diseases in past populations in Asia. Melandri's work, funded by grant bodies including National Geographic and the Royal Society of New Zealand, involves the analysis of human skeletal remains from Vietnam, Japan and Mongolia. She is also involved with repatriation efforts focused on returning Māori and Moriori ancestral remains to iwi and imi (tribes) in New Zealand.

Tanya Smith

Committee Member

Tanya Smith is a Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University. She explores human development, evolution, and behaviour using dental remains. Her research has helped to identify of the origins of a fundamental human adaptation: the costly yet advantageous shift from a “live fast and die young” strategy to the “live slow and grow old” strategy that has helped to make us one of the most successful mammals on the planet. Tanya's popular science book, The Tales Teeth Tell, was published by MIT Press in 2018. She also conducts research on how women are experiencing and influencing academic culture, co-founding a professional mentoring network for women associated with the American Association of Biological (Physical) Anthropologists in 2008. ​​

Phil Roberts

Committee Member

Dr. Phillip Roberts is currently employed as a consulting archaeologist mainly working on cultural heritage management with Aboriginal communities; he has academic affiliations with the Australian National University and Federation University Australia. Phil has multidisciplinary interests authoring papers in fields including economic anthropology, landscape archaeology, palaeoenvironment studies and Aboriginal ethnohistory. In the sphere of biological anthropology, Phil’s has studied historical epidemiology and palaeopathology, mainly in understanding infectious disease behaviour in gold rush and post gold rush populations of the nineteenth century. ​

Ashley McGarry

New Zealand Student Representative

Ashley McGarry is a PhD student at the University of Auckland. Her current research centres on the analysis of burned and commingled remains in Middle East using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and X-Ray Fluorescence.

Karen Cooke

Australian Student Representative

Karen Cooke is currently a PhD Candidate at the Australian National University. Her current research investigates the changes to bone microstructure as a result of treponemal infection, primarily through histological analysis of undecalcified archaeological human bone.