Paul Mitchell: At Penn, Four Years of Looking at the Past

Paul Mitchell's deep interest in anthropology and in exploring human evolution and variation was sparked by his first course in the fall of 2009 during his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. "I thought it was the most interesting and intellectually stimulating thing I've ever seen," he says. During that year, he got a Penn Museum work-study job with Janet Monge, c urator-in-charge of the Physical Anthropology section. She became his mentor and faculty advisor. Mitchell has been Monge's research assistant for nearly four years, helping to organize and catalog the Museum's famous Morton Collection of Human Crania, which contains more than 2,000 skulls from around the world. Mitchell photographed and created state-of-the-art 3D CT scans of the precious collection for researchers to study. "I've been able to do a lot and get a privileged view into the museum world and into the importance of collections, of the use of primary data and working directly with the material evidence," he says.