Dr. Samantha Hens,

Faculty Webpage:

Dr. Samantha Hens is an associate professor at Sacramento State.  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, bioarchaeology, paleoanthropology, and osteology.  She has researched and published on a wide variety of topics including: sex determination from skeletal remains, stature estimation in fossil hominids, and age determination from the pubic symphysis and auricular surface of the ilium in a modern documented Italian collection.  A large focus of her work for several years examined growth, development, sexual dimorphism and geographic variation in orangutan and gorilla crania using geometric morphometrics.  Her current research centers on examining fluctuating asymmetry in the crania of Imperial Roman, Medieval and Iron Age populations from central and southern Italy using three-dimensional morphometrics.