In this episode, we hear from Dr. Kendra Chritz, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Kendra’s dissertation research was on using geochemistry, particularly light stable isotopes, to explore the diets of ancient peoples of eastern Africa during the period of transitioning from hunting and gathering to maintaining livestock, or food production. She also used stable isotopes to understand environmental changes occurring that could help contextualize that human diet switch. Today, she is still a stable isotope geochemist, and runs the Stable Isotope facility at the Pacific Center for Isotopic and Geochemical Research. Here, her research group uses different geochemical tools to explore things like environment, diet, and food webs in the past, mostly focusing on the long term period of mammal evolution, but is also still doing some work on ancient peoples, archaeological peoples, and hominids. Here, Kendra shares what it was like navigating her lab experiments after the breakdown of their mass spectrometer, and how she learned that sometimes, the most important lessons and problem solving you can learn are in times of failure, rather than times of success. Let’s listen!
