Carol V. Ward

Carol Ward is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences in the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Ward studies the evolution of apes and early hominins, focusing on the fossil record from East and South Africa. She co-leads the West Turkana Paleo Project, a National Science Foundation-funded paleontological fieldwork project in Kenya searching for fossil evidence of early hominins and their environments. Ward also studies the evolution of the hominoid torso, combining CT scan data with more traditional analyses. She uses this information to interpret the evolution of body shape and locomotion in ape and human evolution.

She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the African Rift Valley Research Consortium, and holds affiliations with the National Museums of Kenya, Institute of Human Origins, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Evolutionary Studies Institute in South Africa. She holds a Ph.D. in Functional Anatomy and Evolution from the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.