DENTALkeys

Dr Mackie Clare O’Hara-Ali is a paleoanthropologist and dental anthropologist focused on understanding the evolution, ontogeny, and variability of primate and hominin dental enamel. She publishes and is known professionally as Dr Mackie C. O’Hara.

Mackie completed her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (2014), followed by her Master of Arts (2016) and Doctor of Philosophy (2021) in Anthropology at The Ohio State University. For her MA, she investigated seasonal perturbations that are purported to cause repetitive and cyclical enamel defects in primates from Sumatra and Borneo. The topic of her doctoral studies was understanding the relationship between enamel thickness and shape in response to hard-object feeding in both extant primates and fossil hominins.

Mackie is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow, working with Dr Patrick Mahoney on a European Commission project (DENTALkeys) devoted to unlocking the cellular mechanisms that produce variation in enamel thickness in the genus Homo.