Doug Boyer Wins American Association of Biological Anthropologists Mid-Career Research Award

Elizabeth Richardson, Trinity Communications

Doug Boyer looks out of a window.
Doug Boyer’s research and leadership in MorphoSource — a digital repository of 3-D scanned museum specimens — were recognized with the AABA Mid-Career Research Award. (John West/Trinity Communications) 

Doug Boyer, associate professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, received the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) Mid-Career Research Award, which honors mid-career scholars whose work has significantly advanced biological anthropology. Boyer’s research focuses on primate evolution and its environmental context, combining fossil discovery, analytical methods and a commitment to open and inclusive data sharing that has reshaped how comparative biological data are used worldwide. 

Boyer has been recognized for his leadership in creating and managing MorphoSource, one of the world’s leading scientific data repositories. MorphoSource contains digital scans of more than 53,000 biological, paleontological and archaeological specimens from over 1,000 museum collections across all six inhabited continents. Its holdings range from skulls, shells and Sue the T. rex to pollen grains, Civil War injuries and images of living animals.  

Originally developed to store 3D scans from Boyer’s postdoctoral research, MorphoSource has achieved global prominence in less than a decade, ranking alongside GenBank as one of the most important repositories for natural sciences research in a recent survey. Through his efforts to create and maintain this publicly available community resource for digital 3D data, Boyer has transformed the study of primate morphology and fostered open science in biological anthropology and beyond, earning him the AABA Mid-Career Research Award. 

A man'd hands hold two vertebrae, one very small and one very large.
Boyer shows two life-sized 3D printed vertebrae: on the left is a replica of a green anaconda’s vertebra, on the right, a replica of the vertebra of the extinct Titanoboa. Scans of both vertebrae were made available on MorphoSource for education and research by the University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History. (John West/Trinity Communications)