Fellowship / Fellows

Tanya M. Smith

  • 2013–2014
  • Biological Sciences
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Tanya M. Smith
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Tanya M. Smith explores the evolution and development of human dentition. Teeth preserve remarkably faithful records, for millions of years, of daily growth and infant diet and also stress experienced during birth. Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

Smith’s project investigates how we can use teeth to understand the evolution of human life history, including how growth and reproduction have changed from our apelike ancestral pattern. She is examining tooth development and life history in a broad primate sample, including living wild chimpanzees and a diverse sample of fossil hominin children. This will allow identification of the origins of a fundamental human adaptation: the costly yet advantageous shift from a “live fast and die young” strategy to the “live slow and grow old” strategy that has helped to make us one of the most successful mammals on the planet.

Smith’s research is funded by the Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Her work has been published in Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and highlighted in Discover Magazine, National Geographic, Nature, Science, and Smithsonian and through the BBC, the History Channel, PBS, and Voice of America. Smith earned her PhD in anthropological sciences from Stony Brook University and subsequently served as a junior scientist in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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