The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has announced that Dr. Kyle Bocinsky, Ph.D., has been appointed the first William D. Lipe Chair in Research and Director of the Research Institute at Crow Canyon.

Bocinsky, who in 2008 received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Notre Dame and both his master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington State University, will begin his role with Crow Canyon starting in August, according to a press release from Crow Canyon.

He will work with the center’s staff to develop new research projects at Crow Canyon.

The William D. Lipe Chair in Research is supported by donors and is named for Crow Canyon trustee William Lipe, acclaimed for his contributions to archaeology and the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Bocinsky is a member of the research faculties of the University of Montana and Washington State University as well as the Desert Research Institute, the press release said. He has served as the director of sponsored projects and as a research associate for the Research Institute at Crow Canyon, where he is a researcher with Crow Canyon’s Village Ecodynamics Project, a collaboration among researchers at several different institutions to study the interaction between ancestral Pueblo people and their environment over more than 1,000 years.

Bocinsky is also a co-principal investigator on a project funded by the National Science Foundation called Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments, or SKOPE, which is developing large-scale, high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions for the southwestern United States. In addition, Bocinsky is working on the CC-DATA project, which seeks to update the Crow Canyon research database to ensure the data is available to researchers and educators.

His Crow Canyon projects continue to mine the computational legacy of the VEP with his work on the Community Center Reassessment Project, which is a partnership between Crow Canyon and the University of Notre Dame. He also continues to maintain the VEPs “Village” computer simulation so that other researchers are able to learn from it.

Bocinsky’s scholarly interests include computational archaeology, complexity, GIS science, human behavioral ecology, foraging theory, and plant and animal domestication. He is the author of several software packages, including software that allows for easy access to federated datasets, and another software package designed for high-resolution paleoclimate reconstruction.

Bocinsky lives in Missoula, Montana, with his husband, John, and their golden retriever. He will split his time between Missoula and Crow Canyon’s campus in Cortez.