Cynthia M. Beall

Cynthia M. Beall is a Distinguished University Professor and the Sarah Idell Pyle Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, where she is also Co-Director of the Center for Research on Tibet. She has taught at Case Western since 1982, and has also received appointments at CWRU's School of Medicine, the Cleveland Clinic and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She has been honored with the Franz Boas Distinguished Achievement Award (2009) and the Raymond Pearl Award (2012), both from the Human Biology Association. Beall is a board member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and treasurer of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. Currently, she is a member of the National Academies of Sciences' Engineering, and Medicine's Committee on the Science and Practice of Learning and was formerly a member of the NAS's governing Council. Beall received the B.A. degree (1970) in biology from the University of Pennsylvania, and the M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1976) in anthropology from the Pennsylvania State University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is considered an authority on human evolution and adaptations to high-altitude environments. She has conducted ground-breaking investigations of indigenous populations of the Tibetan, Andean, and East African plateaus revealed unexpected differences in the physiological processes by which Tibetan and Andean populations cope with the low levels of oxygen present at high altitudes. She traced these population differences back to their genetic and developmental foundations, and her results have challenged past paradigms and stimulated new ways of thinking about the history of human adaptation and human adaptive potentials. Her unique fusion of field-based biological methods and sociocultural research demonstrated the remarkable possibilities-and limits-of humans living in extreme environments. Her insights, which converge at the intersection between human behavior, biology, and the environment, have profound implications, not only for what they can tell us about our evolutionary past, but also for understanding the future of the human condition in a changing world.