Alumni Spotlight
Since graduating with a doctoral degree in December 2016, Stefani Crabtree has done quite a lot! She is currently an assistant professor of social-environmental modeling at Utah State University, where she combines her background in archaeology with environmental science to study coupled natural-human systems. She teaches agent-based modeling, a course she enjoyed taking once from Tim Kohler and again auditing from Luke Premo. She is also a complex systems fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and also holds many external affiliations, including as a visiting research scholar at the Levin Lab at Princeton University Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, an associate investigator for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, and as a research associate at Crow Canyon Research Institute.
In 2017, Crabtree was able to fulfil a dream and live among the Martu Aboriginal People in Parngurr, Western Australia, to understand their important place in Australian food webs. Building on this experience she continues to work in Australia, and her 2021 paper won a Hyperion Research Innovation Excellence award, the first time this was awarded to an archaeological project. She also continues to co-direct an archaeological project in Northern Mongolia with active field research among the nomadic pastoralists in the area. Her research is rounded out with the Archaeoecology Project, which aims to understand the human place in food webs worldwide.
Outside of work Stefani is still pursuing music, having taken up the electric guitar and mandolin during the pandemic, is learning new languages (someday she will be fluent in Mongolian and Italian, she swears!), cooking, rock climbing, and cycling.
Recent publications:
2022 Crabtree, Stefani A.*, Jennifer G. Kahn, Rowan Jackson, Jacob Earnshaw, Iain McKechnie, Philip Verhagen, Spencer A. Wood, Patrick V. Kirch, Jennifer A. Dunne, Andrew Dugmore.
“Why are sustainable practices often elusive? The role of information flow in the management of networked human-environment interactions.” Global Environmental Change xxx(xxxx):102597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102597
2022 Stefani A. Crabtree*, Jennifer A. Dunne. “Toward a Science of Archaeoecology” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 37(11):976-984. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.07.010
2022 Zirou Qiua, Baltazar Espinoza, Vitor V. Vasconcelos, Chen Chen, Sara M. Constantino, Stefani A. Crabtree, Luojun Yang, Anil Vullikantia, Jiangzhuo Chen, Jörgen Weibull, Kaushik Basu, Avinash Dixit, Simon Levin, and Madhav Marathe.
“Understanding the co-evolution of mask-wearing and epidemics : a network perspective.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (26) e2123355119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2123355119
2022 Jennifer G. Kahn, Abbigail Buffington, Claudia Escue, and Stefani A. Crabtree. “Social and Ecological Factors Effect Long-Term Resilience of Voyaging Canoes in Pre-Contact Eastern Polynesia: a Multiproxy Approach from the ArchaeoEcology Project.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. 9:942. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.750351
2021 Crabtree, Stefani A., Devin A. White, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Frédérik Saltré, Alan N. Williams, Robin J. Beaman, Michael I. Bird, Sean Ulm. “Landscape rules predict optimal super-highways for the first peopling of Sahul.” Nature: Human Behaviour. 5: 1303-1313. https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01106-8
2021 Stefani A. Crabtree, Sarah C. Klain. “Weaving Frames of Knowledge.” Australian Archaeology. 87:3, 307-308, DOI: 10.1080/03122417.2021.1991399
2021 Crabtree, Stefani A., Jennifer A. Dunne, Spencer Wood. “Ecological Networks and Archaeology.” Antiquity. 95 (381): 812-825.
2021 Bird, Michael I., Stefani A. Crabtree, Jordahna Haig, Sean Ulm, Christopher Wurster.“A Global Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Perspective on Modern and Ancient Human Diet.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118(19).
2021 Verhagen, J. W. H. Philip, Stefani A. Crabtree, Hans Peeters, Daan Raemaekers. “Reconstructing human centered interaction networks of the Swifterbant culture in the northwestern Netherlands: An example from the ArchaeoEcology Project.” Applied Sciences. 11(11):4860.
2021 Bradshaw, Corey J., Justin M. Chalker, Stefani A. Crabtree, Bart A. Eijkelkamp, John A. Long, Justine R. Smith, Kate Trinajstic, Vera Weisbecker. “A fairer way to compare researchers at any career stage and in any discipline using open-access citation data.” PLoS One. 16(9): e0257141. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257141