The Florida Museum of Natural History’s Michelle LeFebvre is a recipient of this year’s University of Florida excellence awards for assistant professors. LeFebvre is the curator of South Florida archaeology and ethnography, as well as Caribbean archaeology, and was nominated for the award by Florida Museum director Douglas Jones.
“Michelle LeFebvre is an exceptionally productive researcher and accomplished teacher and student mentor,” Jones said. “She represents a new generation of archaeologists who take a more holistic approach to their work, incorporating new technologies and forming partnerships across traditional disciplines to answer longstanding questions related to ancient Floridians and their relationships to the environment.”
LeFebvre studies century to millennial-scale historical interactions between Indigenous peoples and the environment in parts of Florida and the Caribbean Islands. She’s especially interested in using perspectives from the past to support contemporary biological and cultural heritage protection.
“Working in a natural history museum, I get to regularly work with paleontologists, biologists and on-the-ground heritage practitioners,” she said. “That allows me to draw on social and biological sciences and associated methods to study, and hopefully protect, the long-term intersections of cultural and biological heritage that shape the present.
In the past, scientists have typically stayed in one lane when it comes to research. Wildlife ecologists worked separately from paleontologists, who steered clear of medical doctors, who knew hardly anything about botanists. But the more discoveries scientists made, the more they realized they were studying different aspects of what often turned out to be a unified system. This has been especially true for researchers trying to understand the relationship between humans and the environments they inhabit through time.
Now, collaboration across disparate fields is quickly becoming the norm, and it’s widely recognized that interdisciplinary partnerships will be crucial for addressing global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss and the preservation of cultural diversity.
LeFebvre is an expert in anthropology and the study of animal bones found at archaeological sites. With this dual perspective in both anthropology and biology, she spends an equal amount of time working with people trying to preserve cultural heritage as well as those focused on conserving biological diversity.
“Historically, these two efforts have been approached separately, and while researchers and practitioners from different disciplines don’t necessarily want to compete for resources, that’s the structure they sometimes find themselves in,” she said. “I want to use funding from the award to catalyze growing interdisciplinary conversations around the inherent links between both types of conservation. I want to bring together natural scientists, social scientists and humanities experts because the things that are important for preserving cultural heritage are often also important for protecting biodiversity, and vice versa.”
Preventing the destruction or development of heritage sites not only protects the represented culture, but also the plant and animal communities that live there. Instead of competing for limited resources, LeFebvre noted, it’s imperative that we support researchers working together toward a common goal.
For LeFebvre, this collaboration also extends to community engagement. She regularly works with local officials and communities and engages in consultation with Indigenous peoples. These partnerships are critical for ensuring that research projects honor community heritage values, and that scientific insights and constructive changes are shared among everyone.
LeFebvre helped launch an emergency response with funding from the National Science Foundation after a hurricane destroyed the Bahamas National Museum on the island of Abaco, and did so again two years later when a hurricane tore through an archaeologically rich region of South Florida. She also currently leads an interdisciplinary Conservation Paleobiology Network working group.
Closer to home, LeFebvre works with exhibit staff and educators at the museum to help share Florida’s natural and cultural history.
“I cannot say enough how fortunate I am to work at a museum, where education and outreach efforts are valued parts of research. More and more I find that the “broader impacts” of research, especially within cultural and biological heritage disciplines, are actually my motivation for doing what I love to do.”
Sources: Michelle LeFebvre, mlefebvre@flmnh.ufl.edu;
Douglas Jones, dsjones@flmnh.ufl.edu
Media contact: Jerald Pinson, jpinson@flmnh.ufl.edu, 352-294-0452