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Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
104 Biological Sciences Building
Box 90383
Durham, NC 27708-9976
(919) 684-4124  (Phone)
(919) 660-7348 (Fax)

    Christine Wall

  • Christine Wall

  • Associate Research Professor
  • Evolutionary Anthropology
  • 206B Biological Sciences Building
  • Campus Box 90383
  • Phone: (919) 668-2543
  • Fax: (919) 660-7348

  • Specialties

    • Primate Biology
    • Functional Anatomy

  • Research Summary

    Evolutionary Morphology

  • Research Description

    The major goal of my work is to contribute to our understanding of the functional and evolutionary anatomy of the head, with an emphasis on how the feeding apparatus works and how it influences and is influenced by other structures and functions. My research focuses primarily on the functional anatomy of extant and extinct primates, but I am also interested in other mammalian groups.

    Current research projects include:

    (1) a detailed study of both the recruitment patterns and the fiber types of the jaw adductor muscles of macaques and baboons. The goals are to determine the nature of the general relationship between recruitment pattern and fiber type for the jaw adductors, to find out whether the jaw adductors are sexually dimorphic in these anthropoid primates, and if so, to develop a biomechanical model to describe this relationship and relate it to both size and function;

    (2) investigations of the energetic costs of feeding behaviors in humans and nonhuman primates. The goal of this work is to better understand the relationship between the functional anatomy of the feeding apparatus and the metabolic costs that an animal incurs during feeding.

    (3) a collaborative project with Greg Wray (Duke Biology), Brian Hare (Duke Evolutionary Anthropology), and Sarah Tishkoff (University of Pennsylvania) to study variation in the expression patterns of a number of diet-related genes in chimpanzees and humans; current work in includes a comparative genomic study of genes that code for enamel matrix proteins and associated proteases to document whether the thick enamel trait in humans is associated with positive selection in the noncoding regions of these genes.

    (4) development of a public database - the Feeding Experiments End-user Database (FEED, www.feedexp.org) in collaboration with Dr. Rebecca German (Johns Hopkins), Dr. Susan Williams (Ohio Univ.), Dr. Chris Vinyard (NEOUCOM), and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. This database includes physiological data from a large number of mammalian species collected by numerous researchers. Its design will allow synthetic and integrative analyses of the evolution of the oropharyngeal apparatus and feeding behaviors in mammals. The public instance of FEED is available at www.feedexp.org

  • Education

      • PhD,
      • SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY,
      • 1995
      • M.A.,
      • Anthropology,
      • SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY,
      • 1992
      • A.B.,
      • Human Biology,
      • Stanford University, Stanford, CA,
      • 1984

  • Awards, Honors and Distinctions

      • Nominee, Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award,
      • Duke University,
      • 2000
      • Mildred and Herbert Weisinger Dissertation Fellowship,
      • SUNY Stony Brook,
      • 1994
      • Mildred Trotter Prize,
      • American Association of Physical Anthropologists,
      • 1994
      • NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship,
      • National Institutes of Health,
      • 1994-1997
      • Graduate Council Summer Dissertation Fellowship,
      • SUNY Stony Brook,
      • 1993
      • Graduate Fellowship,
      • National Science Foundation,
      • 1989 - 1992

  • Selected Publications

      • C.E. Wall, M. Briggs, E. Huq, W.L. Hylander, and F. Schachat.
      • 2012.
      • Regional variation in myosin heavy chain composition in the temporalis muscle of female and male baboons (Papio anubis).
      • Archives of Oral Biology
      • .
      • Kivell TL, Guimont I, and Wall CE.
      • 2012.
      • Sexual shape dimorphism in the human midcarpal joint.
      • Anatomical Record
      • .
      • Fedrigo O, Pfefferle AD, Babbitt CC, Haygood R, Wall CE, and Wray GA.
      • 2011.
      • Molecular evidence that a metabolic trade-off contributed to human brain size evolution.
      • Brain, Behavior, Evolution
      • .
      • Wall CE, Vinyard CJ, Williams SH, Gapeyev V, Liu X, Lapp H, and German RZ.
      • 2011.
      • Overview of the feeding experiments end-user database (FEED).
      • Integrative and Comparative Biology
      • 51:
      • .
      • Williams SH, Vinyard CJ, Wall CE, Crompton AW, and Hylander WL.
      • 2011.
      • Patterns of jaw-muscle recruitment evolution in mammals.
      • Integrative and Comparative Biology
      • 51:
      • .
      • Perry JMG, Hartstone-Rose A, and Wall CE.
      • 2011.
      • The jaw adductors of strepsirrhines in relation to body size, diet, and ingested food size.
      • Anatomical Record
      • 294:
      • .
      • Babbitt CC, Fedrigo O, Warner LR, Wall CE, and Wray GA.
      • 2010.
      • Genomic signatures of diet-related shifts in primate evolution.
      • Proceedings of the Royal Society B
      • 278:
      • 961
      • .
      • MacLean EL, Barrickman NL, Johnson EM, and Wall CE.
      • 2009.
      • Sociality, ecology, and relative brain size in lemurs.
      • Journal of Human Evolution
      • 56:
      • 471
      • .
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