Dr. Jenny L. Davis

CIS Co-Founder and UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at UIUC, and director of the American Indian Studies Program. She is also Affiliate Faculty for UIUC’s Gender & Women’s Studies, Linguistics, Spanish & Portuguese, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

Dr. Ripan S. Malhi

CIS Co-Founder and UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Ripan S. Malhi is Professor in Anthropology, Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior, American Indian Studies, and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB). He serves as an advisor for the American Association of Biological Anthropologists Increasing Diversity in Evolutionary Anthropological Sciences (IDEAS) program and the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics (SING) program based in the U.S.A. He currently is Associate Editor of the Yearbook of Biological Anthropology.

Dr. Matt Anderson

External Affiliate

Dr. Matt Anderson (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians descent) is an Associate Professor in the Center for Genomic Science Innovation and Laboratory of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has focused on understanding how genetic diversity in the common fungal resident of the human microbiome and prominent fungal pathogen Candida albicans dictates its interaction with the host. More recent work expanded this to exploration of the complete human gut microbiome, with a focus on the microbial eukaryotes in these systems. As part of this work, his group has partnered with Tribal Nations.

Dr. Alyssa Bader

External Affiliate

Dr. Bader a Tsimshian anthropologist whose community-based, collaborative research program draws from a range of archaeological sciences, including paleogenomics, bioarchaeology, and stable isotope analysis. Her current research is concentrated in the Northwest Coast of North America, where she is investigating relationships between diet, health, and socio-political dynamics in both ancestral and contemporary Indigenous communities. Her research program is guided by a commitment to ethical, community-based research in partnership with Indigenous nations. She maintains a research affiliation with the Sealaska Heritage Institute and is an alum and faculty member of the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics USA program.

Dr. Katelyn J. Bishop

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Kate Bishop is an archaeologist who studies human-animal relationships throughout the Americas, with a specific focus in the North American Southwest. In working with existing collections, she combines traditional methods of zooarchaeological analysis with the study of archival documents and legacy data to reconstruct obscure or lost contextual information and renew the value of old collections in better understanding interactions between people and animals in the past. In her work she also seeks to de-emphasize or set aside normative western narratives of animals as economic resources and instead emphasize the co-construction of the human-animal relationship and the importance of animal agency in shaping it. Her work especially focuses on the significant roles that various birds have played in past societies.

Dr. Renata Ryan Burchfield

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Renata Ryan Burchfield is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Assistant Professor in the American Indian Studies program.

Dr. Julian Catchen

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Julian Catchen is an Associate Professor in the School of Integrative Biology. His work explores questions related to how genomes change over time.

Dr. Amanda Daniela Cortez

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Amanda Daniela Cortez is a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Indigenous Science. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Amanda’s work sits at the intersection of Indigenous studies, animal studies, and anthropology to address questions of Indigenous sovereignty and human-other animal relationships. Her current book project is an ethnography of the politics of Indigeneity, gender, and multispecies relating in Cusco, Peru’s photography tourism industry. The book centers the lives of Quechua women and animals as they confront and refuse state-sanctioned violence. Her previous work focused on the ethics of ancient DNA research with Indigenous Ancestors. At the Center for Indigenous Science, she is developing an ethnography of community-based molecular anthropology to better understand and promote research that centers Indigenous sovereignty. Amanda’s research has been published in the Journal for Social Archaeology, Human Genetics and Genomics Advances, and Anthropology News.

Dr. LaKisha Tawanda David

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. LaKisha Tawanda David’s research incorporates biological and sociocultural anthropology as she delve into the biological and social aspects of genetic genealogy among persons with recent ancestors from Africa. Her work examines family and ethnic identity development among African Americans who use genetic genealogy to identify and interact with their genetic relatives residing in Africa. Similarly, her work examines African perspectives on their involvement with their genetic genealogical connections with descendants of ancestors taken away from Africa during the generations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In support of both the African and African diaspora perspectives, she examines the use of computational techniques to infer genetic genealogy networks spanning upwards of 9 generations. This method provides a powerful link, binding Africans and members of the historic African diaspora in a continuum of shared family, community, and population history. At the heart of her research is a profound quest to unravel the genetic, historical, and emotional narratives interwoven through time and our genomes. It is a quest for identity and belonging with genetics as supporting evidence of a shared family past.

Dr. Alida de Flamingh

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Alida de Flamingh is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Indigenous Science at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Her research uses a genomic lens to investigate the interactions between organisms and the environments in which they live or have historically lived. She analyzes genomes and metagenomes of historical (ancient DNA) and present-day animals to explore the drivers and signatures of evolutionary change which she interprets in context of ecological and anthropogenic change. Her appointment at CIS focuses on the development of molecular wet-lab and computational dry-lab methodologies for the analysis of present-day and ancient DNA data, and the anthropological, ecological, and evolutionary interpretation of these data. Her research projects are united in their aim to develop genome-based methodologies through which we can explore present-day and historic ecology of species of socio-cultural importance.

Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez (she/ella) is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a Xicana who grew up in an activist family, she is deeply committed to the well-being and healing of Indigenous, Black, and Latine/x communities. Prior to academia, she taught high school mathematics to migrant students and students in Title I schools. She focuses on issues of identity and power in mathematics/science, Indigenous futurity and spirituality, political conocimiento in teaching mathematics, living mathematx, and ethnomathematics. Her work is field based, meaning it stems from the needs and desires of mathematics and science educators in public schools and universities/colleges. For the past three decades, she has sought to understand and support mathematics/science educators to navigate the politics of their institutions to better address justice. Her work on Rehumanizing Mathematics, political conocimiento, and creative insubordination has been used in K-12 settings and university/college mathematics and science departments in the US and beyond. She created and runs the Workshop on Rehumanizing Mathematics at Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI). Ultimately, she seeks to continue the work of her ancestors and open up new possible relationships between humans, mathematics/science, and lands/waters. 

Krystiana L. Krupa

UIUC Affiliate

Krystiana L. Krupa serves as the NAGPRA Program Officer for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. The NAGPRA Office manages campus compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and prioritizes the return of Native American Ancestors and cultural items in consultation with Tribal Nations. Krupa’s research interests include NAGPRA and repatriation, scientific colonialism, and the legal landscape around cultural patrimony.

Dr. Juan S. Lopez

UIUC Affiliate

Juan S. Lopez (Quechuan) is a Research Scientist at the Illinois Materials Research Laboratory where he leads the X-Ray core and is a support scientist in the Physical Property Measurement core. He holds a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his research and interests cover many areas including the application of X-Ray Diffraction and X-ray Fluorescence in the study of correlated properties in novel spintronic materials, cultural heritage, and the technologies and material culture of Native Peoples in Pre-colonial North and South America.

Dr. Esther Ngumbi

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is Assistant Professor in entomology and African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. 

Dr. Brandon T. Ritchison

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Brandon T. Ritchison is an anthropological archaeologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the relationships between mobility, environment, history, and sociopolitical organization, particularly on the islands and coasts of the Southeastern United States. He have conducted archaeological investigations in Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, spanning over four thousand years of history. His work explores the causes and consequences of migration of ancestral Native Americans, with a notable focus on the 14th-century depopulation of the Savannah River Valley and its effects on the Georgia Coast. He employs advanced techniques such as Bayesian chronological modeling and geophysical surveys to refine understandings of past human activities.

Dr. Heather Wright

UIUC Affiliate

Dr. Heather Wright is Interim Associate Dean of Student Affairs in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

Dr. Taiye Winful

UIUC Affilaite

Dr. Taiye Winful is an Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Scholar in the Anthropology department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She completed her B.S. in Molecular Biology at Loyola University Chicago and went on to earn her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She then completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Vanderbilt University in 2024, where her dissertation work was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG-BA).

As a biocultural genetic anthropologist, Taiye’s research explores how life experiences become embodied. Specifically, her work focuses on understanding how social factors, through stress, “get under the skin” to cause biological dysregulation in inflammatory responses and consequently influence health and health disparities in African and African diasporic populations, using epigenetic methods. She also has a growing interest in exploring how perceptions of stress, through narrative, can mediate the biological pathways linking stress to inflammation.

Joseph M. Yracheta

External Affiliate

Joseph M. Yracheta is an Amerindigenous Scientist (P’urhepecha y Raramuri from Mexico) at the Native BioData Consortium which exists within the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation (Sioux) of South Dakota. Mr. Yracheta has been a scientist since 1990 where he started as a bench biotechnician and worked across many biomedical disciplines. In 2014 he graduated from the University of Washington-Seattle with a master’s of Pharmaceutics and Bioethics under Drs. Ken Thummel and Wylie Burke. He is currently finishing a DrPH in Environmental Health and Engineering from Johns-Hopkins under Drs. Ana Navas-Acien and Paul Locke. Mr. Yracheta is passionately working to achieve Indigenous Data Sovereignty by “wearing many research hats” of law, ethics, policy, genomics, omics, health outcomes, epidemiology, health care prevention/intervention and amelioration from systemic racism. Mr. Yracheta believes that ALL data and resources must be seen as unforeseen futures, where their value will constantly change. He feels this data must be secured for Indigenous economic and cultural sustainability.