Carry On, My Wayward Sean
It’s never good to lose a member of the company, but when someone leaves to follow his passions, we like to wish him well. mStoner collectively offers best wishes to Sean Lee, who has been working with us part-time in the role of Assistant Producer. Sean is leaving us to work in Egypt, in a position well-suited to his undergraduate studies and to follow a career path he’s highly interested in.
In Sean’s own words:
“I’m going to be on the Amarna Project, as a member of the physical anthropology team. Amarna is a particularly interesting site, because of the 18th dynasty (King Tut, Ahmenhotep etc.). During that period of time, known as the Amarna Heresy, Pharaoh Akhenaten moved the Egyptian capital to Amarna and pulled the kingdom under monotheistic worship of the god Aten. His rule also created a shift in artistic styles in Egypt to be more realistic.”
“This new job is like a more international version of [my other part-time job] at the Field Museum: analysis of human remains. There are obvious things that can be gauged from a survey of a skeleton (inter/intrapersonal violence, deformity, grave theft) but then some not so obvious things. For example, my undergrad research focused on evidence of butchering/cannibalism in Native American remains. On the Amarna Project, I will be looking at signs of metabolic stress and disease on the human body. My goal is to draw on the information about dietary stress and prevalence of disease in ancient remains, and draw comparisons between modern populations that show statistically significant similarities in their demographics. From that I want to reciprocally create public health profiles of both populations drawing on information from each to better understand the other. This will focus largely on fecundity, life expectancy, and cultural factors that contribute to or inhibit disease.”
Wow, Sean. Good luck with all of that!
Patrick DiMichele (Sean’s former manager) is looking at part-time replacements for Sean, who helped us with a number of projects, including usability testing, survey reports, and data migration.
That’s pretty cool. “The Amarna Heresy” sounds like either a) an episode of Stargate SG-1 or b) the latest album from Bad Religion. It will be a shame to see Sean leave higher ed - his knowledge of “butchering/cannibalism” sounds useful for navigating campus politics! Good luck Sean!
Posted on May 5, 2009 by Andy Shaindlin