Curtis W. Marean is a Leakey Foundation grantee and professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the associate director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Marean is interested in the relation between climate, environmental change and human evolution, both for its significance as a force driving past human evolution and as a challenge to be faced in the near future. This is a natural transdisciplinary topic that thrives at the intersection of archaeology, geology, geochemistry, geochronology, and climate and environmental sciences. Curtis has focused his career on developing field and laboratory teams and methods that tap the synergy between the disciplines to bring new insights to old scientific problems. He has spent over twenty years doing fieldwork in Africa and conducting laboratory work on the field-collected materials, with the goal of illuminating the final stages of human evolution – how modern humans became modern.