Michelle LeFebvre
Assistant Curator
Michelle was recently awarded a 2024 University of Florida Excellence Award for Assistant Professors!
E-mail: mlefebvre@flmnh.ufl.edu
Dr. Michelle LeFebvre is the Assistant Curator of South Florida Archaeology and Ethnography collections, and is an affiliate of the UF Department of Anthropology. She received her PhD. from the University of Florida in 2015. Centered within the synergy of culture and biology, she investigates long-term trends in human procurement, consumption, and use of natural resources as a way to better understand and model relationships between humans and their environment through time. To date, the majority of her research has focused on pre-Columbian fisheries and mammal biodiversity within the Caribbean and Florida, creating anthropogenic baselines of aquatic vertebrate exploitation and wild mammal translocation and management. Her research program is explicitly shaped by interdisciplinary collaborations, methods, and data, including archaeological settlement patterns, archaeological and contemporary biodiversity specimens and records, ethnohistoric records, biochemical, geochemical, and chronometric datasets, as well as informatics. The data generated through her research is of transdisciplinary significance and contributes to empirical understandings of 1) how past human activities and environmental circumstance were linked and inform both historical and current patterns of animal biodiversity and ecology (e.g., animal biogeography, management, and domestication), and 2) how such links were embedded within human cultural practices (e.g., social interaction and movement, settlement patterns, and landscape development) and social conceptions (e.g., identity, food).
Learn more about Michelle’s research and goals for the program.
Jen Green
Collections Manager
Email: jgreen@floridamuseum.ufl.edu
Jen is the Collections Manager of South Florida Archaeology and Ethnography. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology from Florida Atlantic University and is finishing her dissertation research through the University of Tennessee. Her doctoral research explores faunal subsistence from tree islands in the northern Everglades during the Late Archaic to Woodland transition to understand the dynamics of social behavior and decision-making processes, landscape mobility, and changes in hydrology across the southern Florida peninsula. Over the past decade she has worked on archaeological sites throughout south Florida and the greater Southeastern United States as well as coastal Ecuador. Broadly, her research interests include historical ecology, forensic taphonomy, natural history collections research, and paleoecology.
To read more about Jen’s journey to the Florida Museum visit this news story!
Annisa Karim
Annisa (uh-NEE-suh) Karim (kuh-REEM)
Operations Manager, Randell Research Center
Email: akarim@flmnh.ufl.edu
Annisa Karim has lived in Florida since she was five years old. She grew up on the southeast coast of Florida and is member of the first graduating class from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Ms. Karim graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. She worked as a Naturalist for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and then helped to develop curriculum for the Florida Master Naturalist Program before she went back to the University of Florida for a Master of Science degree in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation.
Ms. Karim started working at the Lee County Dept. of Parks & Recreation in 2009. She worked first as a biologist, then as a manager with the responsibility of overseeing 17,000 acres of conservation land, 45 employees, and 48 facilities that included everything from ballfields and tennis courts to natural areas.
In June 2021, Annisa pivoted back to the University of Florida by accepting the position of operations manager for the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Randell Research Center.
To read more about Annisa’s incredible journey to the Florida Museum visit this news story!