Peter S. Ungar

Peter Ungar serves as Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Environmental Dynamics Doctoral Program at the University of Arkansas. Ungar is known primarily for his work reconstructing diet and environments from fossil teeth with the help of automated surface characterizations. He has studied wild apes and other primates in the forests of Latin America and Indonesia, analyzed fossils from tyrannosaurids to Neandertals, and developed new techniques to tease information about ecology and evolution from tooth shape and patterns of use wear. He has also conducted research on oral health of the Hadza peoples of Tanzania, the last remaining hunter-gatherers in Africa. And his most recent work using teeth focuses on developing new diagnostic tools for clinical dentistry and documenting diet changes with environment in Arctic animals with an eye toward better understanding impacts of climate change.

Ungar has written or coauthored more than 200 scientific works on ecology and evolution for books and journals including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Journal of the Royal Society, Interface. He has also edited or co-edited three volumes on human evolution, and is author of Mammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution, and Diversity, for which he won a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. His forays into popular science writing include Teeth: A Very Short Introduction, and Evolution's Bite: A Story about Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins.

Ungar received his PhD in Anthropological Sciences from Stony Brook University and taught in the medical schools at Johns Hopkins University and Duke University before joining the University of Arkansas faculty.