Professor Tanya Smith

Tanya Smith is a Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University- and she is passionate about teeth! Teeth preserve remarkably faithful records of daily growth and infant diet, as well as stress experienced during birth, for millions of years. Her aim is to understand fully how teeth grow, why they vary, and how this information can advance the field of human evolutionary biology – topics she elaborates on in her popular science book, The Tales Teeth Tell, published by MIT Press in 2018.

Tanya has previously held a professorship at Harvard University and fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Her research has been funded by the Australian Academy of Sciences and the US National Science Foundation, and published in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances. It has been highlighted in the New York Times, National Geographic, Nature, Science, Smithsonian, and Discovery magazines, as well as through American, Australian, British, Canadian, French, German, Irish, New Zealand, and Singaporean broadcast media.