Peter Ungar

Male professor is seated in front of computer, with book-lined shelves behind him.Peter Ungar, distinguished professor of anthropology, J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Ungar has been working with honors students for more than 20 years. At any given time, he mentors up to a dozen in his lab. Most major in anthropology and biological sciences in Fulbright College, but he has also advised honors student in the Colleges of Engineering and Agriculture. These students, whom he calls “Ungargrads,” have won national-level awards, including the Gates Cambridge Fellowship, and have continued on to the best dental schools, medical schools, law schools and graduate schools in the United States and beyond.

Honors students have always been a cornerstone of the Ungar laboratory group. These students have conducted primary research ranging from studies relating tooth form to function in living and fossil mammals to developing new methods for assessing erosive tooth wear in clinical dental patients. Ungar has coauthored papers with his honors students in international-caliber journals including Folia Primatologica, The American Journal of Primatology, Mammalia, The Journal of Human Evolution, and Biosurface and Biotribology.

Ungar has served on the committee to select honors fellows, and as an “Adopt-a-Prof” for Hotz Honors Hall. He has taught departmental honors courses and the Honors College Signature Seminar called Teeth, and co-taught with Provost Jim Coleman the Honors College Forum on Climate Change. He was an inaugural Dean’s Honors College Fellow in 2017