Risa (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in biological anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Her research and interests center on the adaptive evolution of catarrhine primates (monkeys and apes), focusing on dietary signals inferable across the adult lifespan of an organism. Her research combines dental topographic analysis with surface shape segmentation and machine learning to differentiate macroscopic tooth wear associated with distinct dietary behaviors. Risa’s goal is to be better able to understand the diet of fossil catarrhines, the first apes, from approximately 23 to 15 million years ago by developing a better understanding of how tooth shape wears and changes over the course of a primate’s lifetime within different major dietary categories.