Armita Manafzadeh

Investigating the shape and evolution of animal joints

- Jackie Flynn Mogensen

FIELD COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY Georgia Institute of Technology AGE 31

In paleontology, bones may steal the show.

But to comparative biologist Armita Manafzadeh, joints are where the action is. As she sees it, almost every animal with a backbone that has ever walked, flown, swum or slithered across the planet has done so because of joints. It’s an understudied part of the evolutionary puzzle.