Walker Accepts Position on Board of Carnegie Museum

30 January 2001 -- Alan Walker, distinguished professor of anthropology and biology, has accepted an invitation to join the board of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, one of the nation's leading research museums.  Walker was extended an invitation by Frank Brooks Robinson Sr., chair of the museum's trustees.

One of the most accomplished and renowned paleoanthropologists in the world, Walker has made many important discoveries during the past three decades at paleontological digs in Africa with his collaborators Richard and Meave Leakey.  Among the most famous were hominid specimens known as "The Black Skull" and the "Turkana Boy" skeleton, as well as the skeletal remains of a previously unknown species in the human lineage, which Walker and his colleagues named Australopithecus anamensis, that lived about four million years ago.  Among his numerous discoveries and insights, Walker pioneered the use of electron microscopes to study microwear on teeth to gain an understanding of the diet and eating habits of our ancestors.

He has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 1995.  Prior to that he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University from 1978 to 1995 and an associate professor at Harvard University from 1974 to 1978.  He earned his doctoral degree in anatomy and paleontology at the University of London in 1967 and his bachelor's in natural sciences at Cambridge University in 1962.
 

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