Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, 1994 to the present and Curator of Archaeology at the Field Museum of Natural History 1991 to 2002, Roosevelt researches human prehistory and land use sustainability in tropical forest Amazonia and the Congo. Earlier, as a Curator at the Museum of the American Indian and then a Guest Curator for the South American Hall at American Museum of Natural History, New York, she mounted exhibitions on human ecology, the arts, archaeoastronomy, and culture history in the Americas. As a Principal Investigator, she has been awarded research grants or fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowments, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Social Science Research Council.

For her research, Dr. Roosevelt received a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Explorers Medal, Gold Medal of the Society of Women Geographers, Order of Rio Branco, the Wings Trust Award, and Bettendorf Medal. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Geographical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Anthropological Association, and others.

Her six books are Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present (editor, U. Arizona Press), The Ancestors: Native Artisans of the Americas (co-editor with J.G.E. Smith, Museum of the American Indian and U. Washington Press), Moundbuilders of the Amazon (Academic Press), Parmana: Manioc and Maize Subsistence along the Orinoco (Academic Press), The Excavations at Corozal, Venezuela: Stratigraphy and Ceramic Seriation (Yale University Publications in Anthropology), Ancient Lakes: Cultural and Biological Diversity (co-editor with H. Kawanabe and G. Coulter, Kenobi Press). She has published 85 articles in Science, Nature,Natural History, L’Homme, Man, Geoarchaeology, Quaternary Geochronology, Human Biology, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, Quark, La Vanguardia, Vesmir, U. California Press, Columbia U. Press, Harvard U., Cambridge U. Press, Academic Press, and college textbooks, etc.

Dr. Roosevelt has lectured by invitation across the world and has held endowed lectureships at several universities. She has given plenary lectures at many science organizations, such as her address “Peopling of the Americas” at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, February, 2003.

She has served organizations for the advancement of science, education, human rights, and cultural, historic, and environmental conservation. These included the American Association for the Advancement of Science, European Commission, National Science Foundation, Committee on Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Rainforest Alliance, and Graduate Executive Committee, University of Illinois. Currently she serves on the Board of Directors for Science News, the University of Illinois Graduate College Awards Committee, Human Rights Watch Chicago Committee, Conseil Scientifique du Programme Amazonia, CRNS - France, and as a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation. 05/05