13 Facts About Zeresenay Alemseged

Zeresenay "Zeray" Alemseged is a paleoanthropologist who is a faculty member at the University of Chicago.

Zeresenay Alemseged discovered Selam while working with the Dikika Research Project, a multi-national research project funded in part by the National Science Foundation, which he both initiated in 1999 and leads.

Zeresenay Alemseged completed this program in 1994 and earned a Ph.

Zeresenay Alemseged both leads the project and studies the recovered hominins and other primates.

From 2000 to 2003 Zeresenay Alemseged worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Human Origins in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

In 2004 Zeresenay Alemseged moved back to Europe and became a senior researcher in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Zeresenay Alemseged stayed with the Max Planck Institute until 2008, at which point he became the Curator and Irvine Chair of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

In 2016, Alemseged joined the University of Chicago where he was later named the Donald N Pritzker Professor.

On December 10,2000, the Dikika Research Project, led by Dr Zeresenay Alemseged, found the first piece of a major paleoanthropological discovery.

Zeresenay Alemseged is a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, she was 3 years old when she died and she predated Lucy by 150,000 years.

Usually paleoanthropologists struggle to reassemble fragmentary skeletal finds so as to place them back together, but Zeresenay Alemseged faced the exact opposite situation with Selam.

Zeresenay Alemseged worked painstakingly to extricate her impacted skeleton, using dental tools and removing the soil from her ribs and twisted spinal column virtually grain by grain.

The EAAPPZeresenay Alemseged was the Vice Chairperson and Chairperson of the East African Association of Paleontologists and Paleoanthropologists, before stepping down in 2022, which he co-founded along with Chairperson Dr Emma Mbua.