January 23, 2003
Grayson named AAAS Fellow
Anthropology professor Donald Grayson has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the only UW faculty member among 291 people elected for 2002.
Fellows are chosen for “their efforts toward advancing science or fostering applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.”
Grayson, who has taught at the UW since 1975, was honored for his methodological and theoretical contributions to North American and European prehistory, paleoecology and archaeozoology.
His primary areas of research concern human interaction with the landscape and in using archaeological data to solve biological problems.
For the past six years Grayson has been involved in a dig with French archaeologists at a site in southwestern France that was occupied by Neanderthal and Cro Magnon peoples from about 65,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago.
He is also a participant in a revived debate over the cause of the extinction of large North American mammals, between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Grayson earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1966 and his master’s degree and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Oregon in 1969 and 1973, respectively.
AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and is the publisher of Science. Founded in 1848, it summarizes its mission as “to “advance science and innovation throughout the world and for the benefit of all people.”
