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 a Senior Lecturer 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.

Nick Malone

Vice President

Nicholas Malone is an anthropologist at the University of Auckland with a broad interest in the social and ecological lives of primates, especially those of apes and humans. Specifically, he seeks to understand how the observed patterns of variability within and between taxa are simultaneously shaped by, and act as shaping factors of, evolutionary processes. Additionally, he strives to contribute to primate conservation through a commitment to engaging with local and extra-local efforts. Finally, he wishes to situate the study of primates within the broader contexts of anthropology, history, and research ethics. Malone’s writing is informed by research experiences in Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.​

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 Research Fellow and a Lecturer in Biological Anthropology at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Justyna studies the micro-anatomy and cell structures of bones and teeth both in humans and animal models to better understand skeletal physiology and growth dynamics.

Melandri Vlok

Social Media Representative

Melandri Vlok is a PhD student 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 involves the analysis of skeletal remains from Vietnam, Japan and Mongolia.

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. ​​

Georgia Roberts

Committee Member

Dr Georgia Roberts is an associate lecturer with Federation University Australia at Mt Helen, Victoria. Georgia has research interests in zooarchaeology, bioarchaeology and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, focussing on cold-climate archaeology within Australia.

Caitlin Smith

New Zealand Student Representative

Caitlin is a PhD student at the University of Auckland. Her current research focuses on the analysis of human remains from Bahrain using isotopes and physiological stress indicators. She is also part of a research project in South Australia at a site called Roonka.

Lucille Pedersen

Australian Student Representative

Lucille (Lucy) has recently completed her Masters at James Cook University and aims to commence a PhD in 2018. Her research has focused on trauma and conflict in prehistoric Southeast Asia.