Gen Suwa
University of Tokyo
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Primary Section: 51, Anthropology Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2016)
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Biosketch
I am a paleoanthropologist at the University Museum, the University of Tokyo. I graduated from the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, the University of Tokyo. I received my MS in biological anthropology at the University of Tokyo, and PhD in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. My doctoral research involved the comparative analysis of the Plio-Pleistocene hominid dental fossils of the Omo Valley, Ethiopia. Since the late 1980s, initially based at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, and later at the Department of Biology and the University Museum, the University of Tokyo, I have conducted paleoanthropological field research mostly in Ethiopia. I have served several positions related to promoting biological anthropology in Japan.
Research Interests
Paleoanthropology is a discipline which is comparatively data-poor, for example relative to research areas involving genomics or bioinformatics. Insights are gained from careful accumulation of fossils and contextual information, and from an accurate as possible reading of those partial evidences. Both are less obviously done than it may seem. My colleagues and I have conducted field research at the Konso and Chorora Formation areas and in the Middle Awash Valley, and aim to better clarify the emergence and successive evolutionary stages of human evolution as seen from the fossil record.
