Professor Virginia J. Vitzthum, a distinguished scholar of human adaptation whose work has focused on female reproductive biology, retires from IU this semester. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1986 from University of Michigan, followed by a postdoc in Demography at Michigan's esteemed Population Studies Center.

At IU she has been a Professor of Anthropology and Senior Scientist in the Kinsey Institute, with affiliate appointments in Gender Studies, the Center for the Integrated Study of Animal Behavior, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Upon retiring, she will continue her research as Emeritus Professor of Anthropology.

Before coming to Indiana University in 2008 she held faculty positions at the University of California and SUNY Binghamton as well as an impressive array of visiting fellow and researcher positions, including at the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig) and University of Iceland.

She has twice been a Senior Fulbright Scholar, and twice an AAAS Science and Diplomacy Fellow, contributing to international programs for the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission, reducing female and child mortality, and broadening contraceptive options. She then served at NSF, subsequently becoming an NSF Program Director. Her contributions to science and global health were recognized by her election to Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011. Throughout her career she has been supported by numerous National Science Foundation grants, and funding from the University of California, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and other non-government organizations.

Professor Vitzthum's research focuses on understanding female reproductive biology from molecules to morphology, informed by an evolutionary perspective. Early in her career, she considered the paradox of why women in non-industrialized countries had high birth rates despite arduous physical labor, while women in industrialized countries often became infertile when initiating exercise programs. She developed the "Flexible Response Model," which explained this phenomenon as an evolutionary adaptation to ensure successful reproduction under lifelong harsh conditions.

Professor Vitzthum's prolific scientific career is built on field-based research in some of the most challenging environments humans inhabit, chosen because these populations provide "natural experiments" for addressing complex questions about human adaptations. She has developed numerous field-friendly techniques for unobtrusively measuring human behaviors, collecting biological samples, and maintaining sample integrity in these remote locales.

For more than 30 years she has collaborated with Dr. Hilde Spielvogel of the Bolivian Institute for High Altitude Biology on studies of indigenous Andeans living above 4000 meters.

Professor Vitzthum used the unique “natural experiment" of the cold-war division of Germany to help disentangle the intertwined effects of genetics and life experiences on women's reproductive functioning, and her study of remote nomadic herders in central Asia refuted assumptions that all Asians have low ovarian hormone concentrations. She is currently studying how extreme seasonality in ambient light impacts Icelandic women's physiology.

Although always successful, Professor Vitzthum's projects have never been ordinary. In her first fieldwork in Peru, a faulty propane stove exploded, incinerating her straw-roofed house; later she cajoled a military officer into releasing a fellow student from prison. For an underground HIV-education project, she smuggled 10,000 condoms through customs. And when her shipment of thousands of frozen biosamples from Bolivia was delayed in Miami in mid-summer, she grabbed the next red-eye, tracked down US Customs' Miami director, convinced him to sweet-talk the FDA into releasing the samples, harangued Fed-Ex until they agreed to ship the samples in a freezer for corpses, and soon had the samples at IU with not one thawed.

In studies around the world, she has found that there is far more woman-to-woman variation in "normal" female reproductive functioning than had hitherto been appreciated, challenging the past ideal of a "standard" 28-day menstrual cycle characterized by a "universal standard" set of hormonal rises and falls. Her research has thus had a lasting impact in the fields of human biology, reproduction, evolutionary theory, and demography. Her most recent publication is "How it works: The biological mechanisms that generate demographic diversity" in Human Evolutionary Demography (O. Burger, R. Lee, and R. Sear, eds.).

Her research has been partnered with long-term service, including terms as Program Chair and Secretary-Treasurer for the Human Biology Association, the leading international scientific organization whose members investigate human biological variation using evolutionary perspectives. She's a long-time academic editor of PLoS and the Journal of Sex Research. Within the IU Anthropology Department she has served on almost every committee.

Although she is retiring from IU, Dr. Vitzthum's scholarly legacy is far from complete. She remains deeply committed to science and to the analysis of the data she has worked so hard for so many years to collect and curate. Her most recent, but not final, project examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to contraception throughout the U.S.

The IU Anthropology Department extends our gratitude to Dr. Vitzthum, and wishes her all the best in her future endeavors.