Member Profile: Joan Richtsmeier

What is your current position?

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emerita (as of July 1, 2023)
The Penn State University

What motivated you to pursue a career in biological anthropology?

I did not know what anthropology was prior to taking an undergraduate class in cultural anthropology that sparked my interest. I found the work of Ruth Benedict particularly fascinating. The liberal arts college I attended did not have an anthropology department (it was a department of Sociology and Social work), but it was a very small college and the faculty saw my interest in the few anthropology classes that were offered. They encouraged me to pursue anthropology by taking classes at the University of Notre Dame located across the road and by carrying out fieldwork I had organized as a senior project with members of the Potawatomi Indian tribe of Southwestern Michigan. Through classwork done within an anthropology major, I found out about archaeology excavations and became more interested in material culture. I attended a summer archaeological field school as a work-study student in Kampsville, IL, and then worked on a dig in Oklahoma as a rising graduate student. The site in Oklahoma was a Middle Woodlands village site, and I was assigned to excavate a house floor. My excavation revealed a newborn infant that had been placed with grave goods (a small bone fishhook and some beads). It was a phenomenal experience that made me realize that I was uncovering people’s lives and their behavior, not just their stuff. That summer experience instilled an interest in bone biology and skeletal growth as indicators of human behavior.

After earning a masters at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where I studied Plains archeology, I applied for further graduate training at Northwestern University. Once enrolled there with Jane Buikstra as my advisor, I was able to focus more on skeletal biology and thought that bioarcheology would be my home, but I became disenchanted with archaeology as a career path for a lot of reasons. Jim Cheverud had joined Northwestern’s faculty as a brand-new assistant professor. I was interested in the work he was doing with Cayo Santiago macaque skeletons (especially skulls), so I began to learn more about skeletal biology and anatomy and quantitative methods from him. My interest in skeletal biology, especially how bones vary but follow the same overall blueprint, just blossomed.

Please describe your early career path.

Postdoctoral positions were rare in bioanthropology in the 1980s, but Jim Cheverud promised me a postdoc (he had received a Whitaker Foundation grant that covered a post doc salary) if I finished my dissertation within six months. I made the deadline, barely passed my oral PhD exam due to inexperience in public speaking (I am not exaggerating here), and became a postdoctoral assistant during the summer of 1985, collecting data for Jim’s grant and teaching human gross anatomy at Northwestern University Medical School. I applied for the jobs that were available, which were few, including an assistant professor position at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine‘s Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy. Alan Walker had founded the Functional Anatomy and Evolution group there where he had established a strong group of evolutionary researchers whose primary teaching responsibility was providing cadaver-based human gross anatomy instruction to medical students. I was invited to interview and weeks later was offered the job.

During the interview process I had found out I was pregnant, so when I was offered the job, I informed my future, which in 1986 could have been a deal breaker. From the information I could gather from the available resources (internet was not really a thing yet and email was in its naissance), this extremely male dominated institution simply had no formal maternity leave for employees at the medical school! They hired me but put me on unpaid leave, giving me the job title of Instructor until I was ready to start work after the birth of my first child and leaving the schedule up to me. There was really no one to go talk to about this as there were no rules or maternity leave policy in place. I had girl friends in other professions but none in academia. I felt fortunate that they had not rescinded the job offer, as I was going to miss the first semester of teaching. Once I started back to work in January or February of 1987, my title changed to Assistant Professor and it was full steam ahead. I had written grants before moving and while on maternity leave and was lucky to be successful. I was able to hire a postdoc, I attracted students, and I had the money to buy some equipment to start collecting and analyzing data.

Who have been your most influential mentors?

Sam Pruzansky—He started the Center for Craniofacial Anomalies at the University of Illinois–Chicago, where I had a part time job as a graduate student. Dr. Pruzansky and his clinic opened my eyes to the world of human dysmorphology, genetic disease, and development. Dr. Pruzansky died before I completed my dissertation but not before I collected data. He was instrumental in teaching me how to look at cranial radiographs and think about dysmorphogenesis.

Jim Cheverud—I was his first grad student, and I had identified a dissertation project that would allow me to use new 3D methods to study head shape and change in shape. I had no idea what I was doing, and Jim put aside time every week to tutor me in new methods (I don’t think the term morphometrics existed yet) and make computer programs available to me from his collaborators.

Alan Walker—Alan recruited me to join the Hopkins faculty and 15 years later recruited me to join the faculty at Penn State. At Hopkins he taught me how to be an effective teacher of anatomy. Although I only worked on a few research projects with him that dealt with fossils, our daily conversations gave me the spark for some of the best ideas that I’ve worked on in my career.

Subhash Lele—Subhash and I joined a collaboration when I was disillusioned with quantitative methods that depended upon a coordinate system, and we worked together, meeting weekly for several years. During these meetings, I taught him biology, and he taught me inferential statistics. These meetings spawned the basis of Euclidean distance matrix analysis (EDMA), a number of journal articles and grants, and a book.

Roger Reeves—Roger was a colleague at Johns Hopkins. A brilliant geneticist who studies Down syndrome, he had a mouse model for Down syndrome and wanted to characterize its phenotype quantitatively. I knew how to quantify things, in 3D but I had never worked with mice. Roger gave me that chance and it opened up a world of possibilities for me in how to study human phenotypes using animal models. He served as my mentor on a NIH National Research Service Award to be trained in genetics.

Ken Weiss—Ken was a senior colleague at Penn State when I moved there in 2000, and he and his wife Anne Buchanan welcomed me and my family warmly. Ken and I began collaborating, and he taught me “the other side of genetics.” By that I mean not textbook genetics but “battle the patriarchy” genetics and learning to challenge long accepted ideas.

All my grad students and postdocs—I have had the pleasure of training some really smart, creative people. They have all, down to the last one, been good people and contributed to the laboratory atmosphere in unique ways. I am so grateful for all the lessons, big and small and too varied to describe here, that they taught me.

What were your most formative training experiences?

Learning to collaborate. After starting my appointment at Johns Hopkins, I received a crushing review of a paper based on my PhD thesis that I had submitted for publication. It was extremely negative and, moreover, I couldn’t understand most of the review because it consisted of mathematical equations. I reached out to the Statistics Department to ask if there was some one who could help translate the review for me and was introduced to Subhash Lele, then the youngest faculty member in that department—matching my status exactly. Subhash explained the gist of the review, and this meeting led to an extended collaboration that produced many publications, a grant application, a book, and a treasured friendship. With Subhash, I learned to truly collaborate. I taught him biology while he taught me statistics. We were learning deeply from each other while trying to make it in a tough academic environment at Hopkins.

Proposing a new analytical method. EDMA was not only rejected and ridiculed by the anthropological community but faced organized discrimination. I knew our method was not perfect (no method is) but I also knew that it was correct and worthwhile. Yet finding interesting biological problems outside of traditional anthropology spurred me into learning about developmental biology – a field I love.

Speaking at a Gordon Conference. I didn’t know what Gordon Research Conferences were when I was invited to speak at one later in my career. Gordon Research Conferences are by design relatively small and attended by leading scientists. I am forever grateful to my own insecurity that I over-prepared. My work received more exposure in that 20-minute talk than in any of my publications, and I was able to speak directly to audience members about my work and theirs. I realized after the talk that two women invited me. This was an example of pulling some one else up to their status for at least that meeting.

Sitting on an NIH review panel. I was lucky enough to be the PI of a project funded as part of a program project grant and knew little of how the NIH worked. Once you are an NIH PI you join its pool of potential reviewers and can be invited to become a study section member, which is usually a 5-year term. Being an NIH reviewer is a commitment, and you have to apply, be evaluated, and accepted. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, these review sessions were always held in person: 25–30 people sitting about a very large table for two days discussing the highest scoring grants out of 100 submissions. This taught me to be a better reviewer and taught me how some reviewers think. It also revealed to me the little things that I thought were picky that could sink a grant. Finally, getting the chance to review so many grants taught me how to write strong grants.

What is your sub-specialty and how did you choose it?

I became very interested in growth, especially growth of the bones of the skull, after studying humans with craniosynostosis syndromes for my PhD thesis. Once technologies for collection of 3D data became available, I started looking for appropriate methods for studying growth in 3D. This led to experimentation with, the development of, and application of morphometric methods to problems that concerned the study of growth. Although it has deep historical roots, developmental biology had just been established as a modern discipline in the 1980s while I was training in anthropology. I watched that discipline develop as an outsider, deeply intrigued by the processes of development and the mechanisms that underlie them, but I did not have the training to participate fully. I spent much of my early career trying to use my knowledge of embryology to self-train in developmental biology, became more conversant in genetics by winning a NRSA award to study genetics, and finally ventured into the use of animal models to study development and disease, where I have focused primarily on growth of the brain and the skull and, more recently, on the development of cranial cartilage and dermal bone.

How do you balance the competing priorities of teaching, research, outreach, and personal life?

I have a super supportive husband who became the primary caregiver for our children, doing the bulk of the after-school pick-up and driving and staying home on kids’ school closure days. He is the reason for my success. He gave me time to work, especially at the beginning of my career, and welcomed my participation in whatever of the kid’s activities I could be a part of. As the kids got older and I was more stable in my career and knew better how to manage my time, I was able to spend more and more time with my family. If you ask my grown children now, however, I think they would answer in unison that “mom works all the time”.

After a few years of really working to construct informative lectures and become confident in my knowledge, teaching anatomy was relatively easy. Graduate seminars were more challenging, but I was blessed with really capable graduate students in my early years, so we taught each other. At the beginning of my career, I was not that much older than them. Research is what I really love, but it is much more difficult in my opinion. The excitement of learning new things and discovery made this the favorite part of my career.

Outreach was not required early in my career, but I took advantage of opportunities such as hosting summer students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I did other work in our local community that was not anthropologically based but brought knowledge to the local community. This cannot compare to the outreach young anthropologists are currently doing. I am so happy to see it.

Which professional achievements are you most proud of?

There is no single achievement or award that I’m most proud of. Instead, I’m proud of fighting through decades of imposter syndrome, succeeding professionally, excelling at what I did, and always, always enjoying what I was studying and staying excited about the questions we were asking. But if I must list a few highlights:

• Developing a quantitative method and novel applications of that method that answered fundamental biological questions
• Staring down, rising above, and moving beyond excessive criticism of my morphometric work
• Writing a book with a statistician
• Gaining recurring NIH support
• Discovering new things about how disease-associated mutations affect development

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing women in the biological anthropology community today?

I think the biggest challenge facing all women is to overcome self-doubt; to persist when you are being mocked or worse; and to continue to work hard even when you feel you have been kicked in the teeth. Other challenges include staying novel in your scientific pursuits, being more than a technique-oriented scientist, asking the best questions, and continually working to find satisfactory answers.

What advice would you offer women biological anthropology beginning their scientific careers?

Find something you love and focus on that. Do not go for the popular topic because it is popular—unless of course that topic is your passion. Most likely, you will not stay with the first thing that you study. Each project is a step to the next one, and often you have to make a sudden turn. Read. Read across disciplines. Read reviews and then read the original literature. Read critically. Ask yourself questions about what you are reading. Discuss what you have read with colleagues and students. Take notes about what you have read. Read. Think BIG. Be ready to grab new opportunities and hold on! Pay close attention to critiques, change or improve what you can, and move on. Pick your battles carefully; some things are just not worth fighting about. At work, surround yourself with people that work hard and like to have fun. Be good to everyone you work with. Be good to the weakest student, to the office staff, to the custodial staff, to everyone. And if you screw up, apologize. Keep your friends that are not in academia. Not only will they reward you with friendship and fun things to do, they provide great sounding boards for advice regarding the ridiculous situations academics face at work.

What attracted you to BAWMN and what does participating in BAWMN mean to you?

I was elected to AAPA Executive Committee in 2014 where I learned of BAWMN. It appeared to be such a great idea and offered a safe place for women to network and build collaborations and have fun together. I have been nominally involved after my turn on the EC, as I’ve had executive responsibilities elsewhere, but I have really enjoyed watching BAWMN mature and grow and recruit the next generation of professional women.