Melissa Doyle Boyd

Welcome! Karibu! I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. I study the geological context of human evolution in East Africa. It has been long said that East Africa is the “cradle of humankind,” and if not the cradle, it certainly has been a hotspot for evolution. Additionally, because of its location in the Great Rift Valley, the region has been prone to erosion and uplift, assisting us in our quest to discover fossils of our earliest hominin ancestors. The Turkana Basin is part of the rift valley, and as such, has been a center of research into human evolution and the environmental processes that engender it. I am broadly interested in understanding the geological effects of environmental change in the Turkana Basin. Because this is likely the region from which our ancestors came, understanding the dynamics of environmental change may shed light on how and why certain areas in the basin produce fossils.