Nina Jablonski

Nina Grace Jablonski (born August 20, 1953) is an American anthropologist and palaeobiologist, known for her research into the evolution of skin color in humans. She is engaged in public education about human evolution, human diversity, and racism. In 2021, she was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and in 2009, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She is an Evan Pugh University Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, and the author of the books Skin: A Natural History, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, and the co-author (with Sindiwe Magona and Lynn Fellman) of Skin We Are In.

Jablonski grew up on a farm in upstate New York State. With encouragement from her parents, Jablonski began her exploration into the world of science when she was quite young.  She recalls exploring the nature around her home, digging for fossils near creeks and trees. Jablonski's interest in studying human evolution stemmed from watching a National Geographic feature on the research of the famous paleoanthropologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, that aired in the mid-1960s. Louis Leakey's study at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa and his focus on the hominid Zinjanthropus boisei sparked Jablonski's attention. She instantly decided that she wanted to pursue the study of human evolution, dismissing her parents' desire for her to attend medical school.

Jablonski earned an A.B. degree in biology from Bryn Mawr College in 1975. In the same year, she enrolled in the PhD program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Working under the primary supervision of paleoanthropologist Gerald Eck, she became interested in the evolution of the African Old World monkeys and completed her PhD in anthropology in 1981 with the dissertation, "Functional Analysis of the Masticatory Apparatus of Theropithecus gelada (Primates: Cercopithecidae)." She has continued to research the evolution of the Old World monkeys and other Old World primates, including tarsiers, lemurs, and chimpanzees, until the present day. She has held teaching positions at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Western Australia. During these years, Jablonski began her research on the evolution of human bipedalism and skin color.

Jablonski is married to George Chaplin, a geospatial scientist, who is another professor as well as her research collaborator at Penn State University.  She can write and speak fluently in Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese), and is also able to read in both Latin and German.

While a graduate student at the University of Washington, Jablonski conducted research at the University of Hong Kong in the Department of Anatomy. After completing her PhD, Jablonski accepted a position as lecturer in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Hong Kong. Remaining in this position from 1981 to 1990, she was able to continue her research into comparative anatomy and paleontology. She began research in cooperation with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing in 1982 and the Kunming Institute of Zoology in 1984. Her interest in the history of the East Asian paleoenvironment and the impact of environmental change on the evolution of mammals, especially primates, was spurred by her association with paleobotanist Robert Orr Whyte and his wife Pauline Whyte. The Whytes had inaugurated a series of biannual meetings under the auspices of the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong that brought together prominent geologists and paleoenvironmental scientists from China and other East and Southeast Asian countries. Jablonski took over the organization of the paleoenvironmental conferences and the editing of the conference proceedings after the deaths of the Whytes. While in Hong Kong, Jablonski assisted the Forensic Pathology Service of the Royal Hong Kong Police in the identification of numerous unknown human remains, including the refinement of the use of photographic superimposition for the positive identification of individuals. Working in collaboration with colleagues from the Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry, Jablonski created the collection of human skeletal remains at the University of Hong Kong. While still in Hong Kong, Jablonski began her research collaboration with George Chaplin on the origin of bipedalism in the human lineage; this work resulted in a series of publications in the early 1990s.

After her time in Hong Kong, Jablonski moved to Australia with her husband, George Chaplin, where she worked in the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia from 1990 to 1994 as a Senior Lecturer. During this period, she began research on the evolution of human skin color. This research, along with her work on the evolution of human bipedalism, constituted her first forays into the study of human evolution and human diversification. She felt that the study of such topics was valuable for researchers because it showed that basic tools of comparative and historical biology could be used to deduce what probably happened in the past.

From 1994 to 2006, she held the Irvine Chair of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. During this time, she was recognized as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her responsibilities at the California Academy of Sciences included organization of the Wattis Symposia in Anthropology and publication of the edited proceedings of those symposia. Among the Wattis Symposium volumes she edited was The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, which included important contributions about the nature and timing of human movements into the Americas.

After leaving the California Academy of Sciences, she moved to The Pennsylvania State University, where she served as head of the Anthropology Department from 2006 to 2011. She is currently an Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology at Penn State. Jablonski's research at Penn State has focused on the evolution of Old World monkeys, primate thermoregulation, and the evolution and meanings of human skin pigmentation. Starting in 2012, in partnership with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., host of the PBS show Finding Your Roots, she led the development of a curriculum aimed at getting younger students of color more interested in STEM. A series of PBS webisodes, "Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings" was released in 2017 and 2018 with three of the episodes earning Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards in 2018 and 2019.