Elen Feuerriegel, 2015
Extraordinary Women Leader featured in this year’s EWLS magazine is also a 26
years old PhD Fellow at the Australian National University who studies
Paleoanthropology. She is one of the six women cavers who discovered Homo
Naledi. Her background consists of caving, rock climbing, and excavating
fossils in mine shafts. She has a solid grasp of anatomy and is small to fit
through the tiny of crevices that sit between the surface and what turned out
as treasure trove of bones. When she started Her PhD, Elen didn’t think it
would go anywhere until one day when she and the team she was on helped uncover
Homo Naledi. It all started when She had responded to a posting on Facebook
seeking small cavers. She stated "It's important that our
achievements as women become more public. It sets the stage for very young
girls to go into fields like this, without having to worry about discrimination
or their own capabilities, because there's this legacy of women who have done
this work before. And they've done it really, really well.”
Besides her excavating adventure in South Africa, she is
also a photographer. What lead her in to photography was her research in
looking at ways of recording morphological variations at sites where muscle
attaches to the bone in humans and non-human primates. She mentioned that she
is developing a technique that involves taking high resolution photographs of
the skeletal material. She has always had an interest in photography but had
only lacked the camera to really explore what she was wanting to do. She got in
to Caving when she was about 10 years old. Her mother would take her and her
sister on guided tours in the Jenolan caves in the Blue Mountains that are outside
of Sydney. It was a pitch dark and a claustrophobic
nightmare for her mother but her and her sister loved it. “It was such as
thrill and it stuck with me into adulthood.” Elen said.
#ewls #womencavers #speleology #ScienceWomen #WLeaders
#ewls #womencavers #speleology #ScienceWomen #WLeaders
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