In this episode of InspectTech, Michelle Wright welcomes archaeologist and Yale University research faculty member, Dr. Ellery Frahm. Dr. Frahm has conducted and published archaeological research on four continents, spanning nearly half a million years of human history, and he has an impressive 20+ years of X-ray spectrometry experience. He and Michelle deep dive into his application of portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to gather archaeological data, some of which has been published in the journal Science. Listen in to hear their fascinating conversation.

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Dr. Ellery Frahm is a research faculty member and an archaeological scientist at Yale University. He has conducted and published archaeological research on four continents, spanning nearly half a million years of human history. He also has more than 20 years of X-ray spectrometry experience, and he started using portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) as an analytical tool in archaeology in 2006.

His research has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover Magazine, The Economist, National Geographic, Science News, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. His portable XRF data are also the first to be published in the journal Science.

He studied physics and anthropology at Grinnell College, and he completed his doctorate in Anthropology with an emphasis on Archaeology at the University of Minnesota. During graduate school, he also managed the University of Minnesota’s Electron Microprobe Laboratory, a state-of-the-art facility for X-ray spectrometry and scanning electron microscopy.

As a Marie Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield in England, his postdoctoral project, Portable XRF Applications in Archaeology, played a central role in the project New Archaeological Research Network for Integrating Approaches to Ancient Material Studies, or NARNIA for short, which had a budget of over €4.6 million.