About

Ethan Fulwood, PhD

I am an Assistant Professor of Anatomy at the DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine at Lincoln Memorial University. I grew up in East Tennessee in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and studied Anthropology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, where I also worked summers at the Gray Fossil Site near Johnson City. Hoping to work on fossil primates, I moved to the Boyer Lab in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, where I completed my PhD, ultimately on lemur diversification through the lens of the evolutionary functional morphology of lemur teeth. I also helped teach human gross anatomy at the Duke School of Medicine and as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Neuroscience at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine.

I am interested in the connections between developmental processes, the generation of variation within populations, and macroevolutionary morphological diversity. My work combines tools of functional morphometrics with phylogenetic and disparity analyses to try to understand the generation of diversity, with a particular focus on the teeth of primates and other mammals. I’m particularly interested in the effects of periods of environmental change and extinction on morphological diversity.