University of the Cape Town
University of the Cape Town (UCT) 🇿🇦
The University of Cape Town (UCT) is located in Rondebosch, South Africa, and is the premier higher learning institution in Africa. UCT is an inclusive and engaged research-intensive African university that inspires creativity through outstanding achievements in learning, discovery and citizenship; enhancing the lives of its students and staff, advancing a more equitable and sustainable social order and influencing the global higher education landscape. Research in the Department of Archaeology at UCT focuses on the cultural and biological records of the past and present. South Africa is endowed with a rich and unique archaeological, fossil and ethnographic record, giving considerable advantage in this respect. Research subjects include the record of early ape-like hominins, the first members of our genus Homo, modern human origins, hunter-gatherer societies, farming communities, and colonists.
Co-supervisor of PhD candidate 6
Professor Rebecca Ackermann, Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Director of the Human Evolution Research Institute. Rebecca Ackermann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at UCT, and a recipient of the UCT Distinguished Teacher Award. She received a Masters degree in forensic anthropology (University of Arizona) and a PhD in physical anthropology (Washington University in St. Louis), and was a postdoctoral associate in anatomy (Wash U.) in the USA before taking up her post at UCT in 2000. Rebecca Ackermann and her research group (housed in the Morphometrics Laboratory) are focussed on understanding how adaptive (selection) and non-adaptive (e.g drift, gene flow) evolutionary processes shape the phenotype in mammals, with an ultimate goal of providing a foundation for detecting these processes in the fossil record of primate and especially human evolution.