Chatham professor, Kevin Hatala, receives NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award

Kevin G. Hatala, Ph. D., an associate professor of biology at Chatham University, was recently honored with an esteemed National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Award for his proposal, “Tracking the evolution of human locomotion through field, experimental, and computational analysis of fossil footprints.”

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

“Locomotion is integral to any animal’s adaptive suite, and paleoanthropologists have long sought to understand how and when modern human-like locomotion evolved,” Hatala writes in his project summary. “Yet because many of our fossil relatives are known only from small samples of fragmentary bones, numerous fundamental questions about our locomotor evolution remain unanswered.” 

Dr. Hatala’s proposal detailed his planned work to expand the known fossil record through excavations of at least six 1.5-million-year-old hominin footprint sites he and his colleagues have discovered in northern Kenya's Turkana Basin. Hominin is a term that refers to extinct members of the human lineage. He hopes to address long-standing questions about whether and how locomotor diversity may have played a role in adaptive niche partitioning during early Pleistocene hominin evolution and whether modern human-like bipedalism (walking and running efficiently on two legs, as we do today) emerged in hominin species that lived at this time. 

Dr. Hatala earned a BS in Biological Anthropology & Anatomy at Duke University and a PhD in Hominid Paleobiology at The George Washington University. He conducted postdoctoral research as a National Science Foundation Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Fellow and a Junior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Dr. Hatala has been a member of the Biology faculty at Chatham University since 2016.  More information about Dr. Hatala and his research can be found at https://www.hatalalab.com/.