Terence Capellini

Harvard University

Terence D. Capellini is a Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His undergraduate education was at Binghamton University where he was an Anthropology major focusing on human skeleton evolution. This was followed by his Masters Degree research at Kent State University, where he studied archaeological assemblage formation, and human skeletal evolution. He acquired his MPhil and Ph.D from the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (C.U.N.Y) working in the laboratory of Licia Selleri (Weill Cornell Medicine) on the development of the skeleton, and then performed his post-doctoral research in the laboratory of David Kingsley (Stanford University) on the genetics of skeletal evolution. His interdiscipinary lab at Harvard bridges functional genomics and genetics, developmental biology, medical genetics, and paleoanthropology. His lab is currently focusing on how gene regulation shapes different bones of the skeleton, how interbreeding with Neandertals facilitated human skeletal adaptations, and how alterations to gene regulation during human evolution have influenced the modern world-wide risk of bone diseases, especially joint-specific osteoarthritis.