Ashley Atkins is currently a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She has a MSc in Forensic Anthropology from Liverpool John Moores University (2016) and BA in Anthropology from Lee University (2015). As an undergraduate student she studied abroad in Japan, focusing on Japanese culture, and participated in archaeological fieldwork in Tennessee and osteological training at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility. During her MSc she excavated a medieval cemetery in England, worked with the forensic experts of the Carabinieri in Italy, and completed her thesis research with the skeletal collections housed at the Museum of London. Her dissertation focuses on the origin of modern Japanese using Neolithic skeletal remains. Her interests are biological anthropology, human origins and migration, human variation, paleopathology, and forensic anthropology.