By Bill Schlotter

	Michael Gurven, assistant professor of anthropology, works with Bolivian peoples.

Michael Gurven, assistant professor of anthropology, has won UCSB’s 2004 Harold J. Plous Award, one of the campus’s most prestigious faculty honors. The award is given annually by UCSB’s Academic Senate, on behalf of the faculty, to an assistant professor who has shown exceptional achievement in research, teaching, and service to the university.

Gurven, who joined the faculty in 2001, was presented with the award at the Nov. 4 meeting of the Academic Senate. He said he was surprised and honored to be selected a Plous winner. “I am, of course, very grateful and pleased to have been chosen,” he added.

In addition to receiving a $500 cash award, he will be given an opportunity to showcase his research by giving the annual Plous Lecture at a date to be announced early next year. That research, which involves extensive fieldwork with the Tsimane people of Bolivia, is both broad and detailed.

“Dr. Gurven and his collaborators are expanding upon current theories about several questions of human evolution,” the Plous selection committee said in its recommendation of Gurven. “Why are human life spans so long, with significant portions spent in a post-reproductive state? Why are brains so large? Why is childhood long and delayed?”

Gurven’s research is also providing science with a documented look at how aging occurs in a non-Western subsistence population that has little access to medicines, immunizations, or supermarkets, the committee said. And his collection of health-related information is proving important in the identification of key gender-specific medical problems across the lifespan of people in several remote Tsimane villages.

As a teacher, Gurven has both restructured and developed his department’s biosocial anthropology program, setting up a new series of upper division classes. Students describe him as an enthusiastic instructor. He is also a much-sought graduate adviser, who has taken both graduate and undergraduate students into the field with him to expose them to field methods and new cultures.

The award is named for the energetic Harold J. Plous, an esteemed assistant professor of economics at UCSB from 1950 until his death in 1957.