New York University College of Dentistry's Dr. Timothy Bromage has been selected to receive the 2010 Max Planck Research Award. Dr. Bromage will collaborate with Dr. Friedemann Schrenk of Frankfurt's Senckenberg Research Institute to research the microanatomical structure of bones and teeth, and the links between metabolic states, growth rates, life spans, and biological features such as sex and body size.
The award, given by the Max Planck Society and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, includes a stipend of 750,000 Euros ($1.02 million USD). The 2010 award, given annually to two researchers, will be presented during the Annual Meeting of the Max Planck Society on June 17th in Hanover, Germany. This year's other recipient is psychologist Michael Tomasello, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
In citing Dr. Bromage's qualifications for receiving the award, the selection committee noted that his research on the microanatomical structure of ancestral human teeth and bones has established the modern fields of human evolution growth, development, and life history -- the pace by which an organism grows. Moreover, noted the committee, his research has shown a relationship between bone and tooth microstructure and body size, metabolic rate, age, and other biological features.
Dr. Bromage, a professor of basic science and craniofacial biology and of biomaterials and biomimetics, was the first researcher to use biologically based principles of craniofacial development to reconstruct early hominid skulls. His computer-generated reconstruction of a 1.9 million-year-old skull originally discovered in Kenya in 1972 by renowned paleontologist and archeologist Richard Leakey showed that Homo rudolfensis, modern man's earliest-known close ancestor, looked more apelike than previously believed. Dr. Bromage's reconstruction had a surprisingly smaller brain and more distinctly protruding jaw than the reconstruction that Dr. Leakey assembled by hand, suggesting that early humans had features approaching those commonly associated with more apelike members of the hominid family living as long as four million years ago.
In human evolution fieldwork, Dr. Bromage's 1992 discovery of a 2.4-million-year-old jaw in Malawi unearthed the oldest known remains of the genus, Homo. The discovery, made in collaboration with Dr. Schrenk, director of Paleoanthropology at the Senckenberg Research Institute, marked the first time that scientists discovered an early human fossil outside of established early human sites in eastern and southern Africa.