Student Information

Faculty Profiles

Dr. Matthew Wund

“What really excited me as a child was the idea that my suburban New Jersey backyard didn’t always look the way it looked,” he recalled. “As long as I can remember, I understood the earth was very, very old. The plants and animals on this planet changed and at one time there were dinosaurs walking through my backyard. I used to look out my bedroom window and imagine what it looked like in the past.” Being an evolutionary biologist, Dr. Wund says, is like never quite growing out of your childhood dinosaur phase.

Course Profiles

People and Places in the East African Rift

People and Places in the East African Rift is an interdisciplinary course taught by a physicist and a historian. The course is organized around one fundamental question: what is the relationship between physical landscapes and the human societies that inhabit them? The main goals are for students to understand how unique geological and environmental features came to exist, to analyze how these features affected the various human societies that came to inhabit the regions, and how these landscape features and different societies both evolved through time.

School of Science