Spring Colloquium: Dr. Leslie Reeder-Myers

Reception to follow.

Leslie Reeder-Myers is a post-doctoral fellow at the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in 2012. As an archaeologist and geographer, she studies the impact of sea level rise and climate change on coastal populations in the past. Her current research focuses on Chesapeake Bay and on California’s Channel Islands, working to understand how ecosystems (including people) adapted to local sea level rise from the end of the Pleistocene through to the modern day. She uses GIS and computer modeling to reconstruct ancient shorelines and nearshore ecosystems in collaboration with colleagues at the US Geological Survey. She combines these reconstructions with zooarchaeological research into human subsistence and settlement practices to investigate how people used and adapted to a shifting landscape. Reeder-Myers’ current work in Chesapeake Bay combines the long-term, general environmental data from sediment cores with the detailed, short term data from small oyster middens to gain a multi-scalar understanding of ecological change through time. She also applies this work to modern conservation science, helping to explain how marine ecosystems can adapt to today’s rapidly changing human and environmental context.