PULLMAN – Two graduate students made WSU history on April 5 when they became the first recipients of National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships in the anthropology department.
Stefani Crabtree
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Stefani Crabtree and Kyle Bocinsky were selected for the fellowships based on their outstanding abilities and accomplishments, as well as their “potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the U.S. science and engineering enterprise.”
Only 1,654 NSF graduate fellowships are awarded annually, depending on availability of funds, and there are just 21 archeology recipients nationwide. Upon the formal acceptance of the award on May 1, Crabtree and Bocinsky will receive research funding for a maximum of three years.
“It speaks highly of our program and of our students when we are able to land NSF fellowships of this caliber,” said anthropology chair Bill Andrefsky.
Kyle Bocinsky |
“My professor met with me once a week to discuss Egyptology in personal tutorials. Her passion really fueled my desire to do archaeology,” Crabtree said. She returned to France the following summer to take part in the excavation of a Gallo-Roman settlement, which became the subject of her senior thesis.
“Being the first person who saw a discarded artifact, a buried sacrificial animal on the floor of a house more than 2,000 years old, was amazing,” she said. That experience, as well as others that she had at Scripps College, her undergraduate institution, led to her change in major from politics and theater to archeology and to her current success at WSU.
“The NSF grant will provide me with the means to pursue research both at WSU and internationally. I am thrilled that this grant will not only help to boost my career, but also will help the WSU anthropology department. Being a nationally recognized scientist is pretty amazing,” said Crabtree.
Second-year master’s student Bocinsky also works with the NSF funded VEP. Through his research he hopes to broaden archaeologists’ understanding of how turkey domestication spread across the southwest region of the United States.
“The NSF graduate research fellowship gives me the freedom to design a truly influential dissertation project. In particular, it will allow me to get the additional training and coursework needed to do such research. I look forward to potential residencies at institutions such as the Santa Fe Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre,” he said.
Crabtree and Bocinsky have been working together since last fall and both anticipate their research being influenced by one another.
“I’ve really enjoyed having Stefani as a colleague, and I look forward to working alongside her as our careers develop. We are both indebted to Professor Tim Kohler for his tireless support,” Bocinsky said.