Anthropology

Dr. Samantha Hens

Faculty Webpage:

Dr. Samantha Hens is an associate professor at CSUS. She received her B.A. from S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She held a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at Johns Hopkins University prior to coming to Sac State in 2000.

Her research interests include morphometrics, human and non-human primate skeletal biology, paleoanthropology, dental anthropology and osteology/forensics. With such varied research interests she has worked on such topics as: sex determination from skeletal remains, dental wear, and stature estimation in fossil hominids. During the last few years, her work has focused on growth, development, sexual dimorphism and geographic variation in orangutan crania using geometric morphometrics. Currently, she is working on determining whether the highly dimorphic great apes, orangutans and gorillas, share a similar pattern of dimorphism based on an underlying common growth mechanism or whether they exhibit a different pattern of dimorphism due to localized environmental adaptations.

She maintains a website linked to this page for course related materials…check it out!