William H. Kimbel

Kimbel CV

Faculty Profile

Physical Anthropology

Kimbel, who moved to ASU with the Institute of Human Origins (IHO) in 1997, is Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and Director of the Institute of Human Origins. He conducts field, laboratory, and theoretical research in paleoanthropology, with primary foci on Plio-Pleistocene hominid evolution in Africa and the late Pleistocene of the Middle East.

Recent field work has taken Kimbel to the Hadar hominid site in Ethiopia, where he has codirected paleoanthropological research since 1990, and to northern Israel, where he has collaborated with Israeli colleagues on the excavation of Middle Paleolithic cave deposits. His lab-oriented interests are in the evolution of hominid skull morphology and function, variation, and systematics and the concept of the species as applied to paleoanthropological problems. Since 1989, Kimbel has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on eight National Science Foundation and other research grants totaling $775,000.

Kimbel was Joint Editor of Journal of Human Evolution from 2003–2008.

ASU courses taught by Kimbel include "Fossil Hominids," an upper-division undergraduate survey of the fossil evidence for human evolution; "Primate Paleobiology," graduate seminar (team-taught with Prof. Kaye Reed); and "Paleoanthropology," also a graduate seminar.

In 2003, Kimbel mentored his first PhD student, Shara Bailey, who completed a dissertation entitled " Neandertal Dental Morphology: Implications for Modern Human Origins."

In the Department of Anthropology (the predecessor to the School of Human Evolution and Social Change),  Kimbel served as Director of Graduate Studies from 1999–2003. In 2005, Kimbel was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.