Louise Corron | Anthropology | College of Liberal Arts

Summary

Louise Corron’s research focuses on understanding the different levels of expression and causal factors behind variation in contemporary subadults to refine parameters of the biological profile, namely age, sex, and ancestry.

As a postdoc, her research is part of a group effort to improve anthropological methods for the study of subadult individuals in both forensic and bioarchaeological contexts. She works on two ongoing projects to improve age and ancestry estimation and has experience working with dry bone and medical images (X-rays and CT scans) and reconstructed bone surfaces. The samples and data she helped collect now constitute the Subadult Virtual Anthropology Database (SVAD), a large, diverse collection of raw data and/or medical images from modern subadults (ages birth to 20 years) from eight different countries used for four federally-funded projects awarded to her supervisor, Kyra Stull (National Institute of Justice 2015-DN-BX-K009, 2017 DN-BX-0144, and 2019 DU-BX-0039 and National Science Foundation NSF BCS-1551913) to develop subadult age, sex and ancestry estimation techniques. Data collected on these varied samples include long bone measurements, vertebral measurements, epiphyseal fusion and ossification stages, dental development and pelvic landmarks. Generalizability and standardization of data collection protocols and methods are two keys components of her work.

She is also interested in determining the limit between normal skeletal variation and pathology. As such, her research also involves looking at skeletal markers of stress such as vertebral neural canal dimensions and evaluating their relationship with life history, socio-economic status and population affiliation. Her research always aims to focus on understanding the broader expression of variation before applying it to developing skeletal methods.

Corron is a member of the American Association of Forensic Sciences, American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris.

Research interests

Biological anthropology

Human variation

Growth and development

Biological profile methods

Selected publications

Stock MK., Garvin HM., Corron LK., Hulse CN., Cirillo LE., Klales AR., Colman KL., and Stull KE. (2020) “ The Importance of Processing Procedures and Threshold Values in CT Scan Segmentation of Skeletal Elements: An Example Using the Immature Os Coxa.” Forensic Science International 309: 1-8.

Corron L., Marchal M., Condemi S., Adalian P., Navega D. (2019) Sub-adult Aging Method Selection (SAMS): a decisional tool for selecting and evaluating sub-adult age estimation methods based on standardized methodological parameters. Forensic Science International 304, 109897

Corron L., Marchal M., Condemi S., Telmon N., Chaumoître K., Adalian P. (2018) Integrating growth variability of the ilium, fifth lumbar vertebra, and clavicle with multivariate adaptive regression splines models for subadult age estimation. Journal of Forensic Sciences 64 (1): 34-51 doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.13831

Corron L., Marchal M., Condemi S., Adalian P. (2018) A critical review of sub-adult age estimation in biological anthropology: do methods comply with published recommendations? Forensic Science International 288 328.e1-328.e9.

Corron L., Marchal M., Condemi S., Chaumoître K., Adalian P. (2017) Evaluating the consistency, repeatability and reproducibility of osteometric data on dry bone surfaces, scanned dry bone surfaces and scanned bone surfaces from living individuals. Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris. 29:33-53 DOI 10.1007/s13219-016-0172-7

Corron L., Huchet J.-B., Santos F., Dutour O. (2017) Using classifications to identify pathological and taphonomic modifications on ancient bones: do “taphognomonic” criteria exist? Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris. 29:1-18 DOI 10. 1007/s13219-016-0176-3

Funding

Recipient of the Young Forensic Scientist Scholarship Award from the Fredric Rieders Family Foundation to attend the InterForensics conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, May 21-24 2019.