Kieran McNulty

Kieran McNulty is an American anthropologist and an expert in the physical anthropology of primates. He is the director of undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota.

Education
McNulty was educated at St. Francis High School in Traverse City, Michigan, where he was a student athlete involved in debate and marching band. He earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and earned his Ph.D. in 2003 through the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP), utilizing resources from the American Museum of Natural History, the City University of New York, Columbia University, and others. Physical anthropologist Eric Delson, Ph.D. served as graduate advisor for McNulty's doctoral degree.

Career
McNulty served as an assistant professor at Baylor University. He was a Visiting Leverhulme Professor at Durham University. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota, where he was awarded the McKnight Land-Grant Fellowship 2008. He created and serves as director of the National Science Foundation-funded REACHE project, an international research network that coordinates field work on Miocene fossil apes in East Africa. In addition to the NSF, McNulty's research has been funded by the NIH and the Leakey Foundation. One important contribution of McNulty's work is his discovery of a new species in the evolutionary chain, with fossilized skeletons that resemble small 'hobbit'-like primates. McNulty had a work research fellowship at Stony Brook University and was a Science Fellow at the Ross University in 2014. He served as an advisor for the Ross Institute's work at the Pontifical Academy of Science Conference on "Children and Sustainable Development: A Challenge for Education" at the Vatican. McNulty is a contributor at the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

Humanitarian work
In 2016, McNulty helped open the Kathy and Mike McNulty Academy (KMMA) on Rusinga Island, Kenya, to provide free education to orphaned children. He later started a non-profit organization called Friends of KMMA-CAITHS to provide clean water and medical supplies as well as support the academy.