UTA Alumna Earns Prestigious Leakey Grant

Thursday, Apr 16, 2026 • Jayce K. Smith : Contact

What can early human societies reveal about how we lived, adapted, and understood the world around us?

For Peyton Carroll, that question has taken her from UTA classrooms to fieldwork across Africa—and now to international recognition for her research.

Carroll (BA Anthropology, 2019) has been awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant, one of the most competitive honors in the field of human origins research. The grant will support her dissertation research on early human society in Sicily, where she is examining how early communities organized, adapted, and interacted—contributing to broader conversations about human evolution and social development.

While her current research is based in Sicily, her path into paleoanthropology began at UTA, where she was selected as a HOMER Scholar in 2019. Through the program, Carroll conducted fully funded research in South Africa with UTA faculty and in Malawi alongside collaborators from Yale University—experiences that helped shape her trajectory as a researcher.

That foundation continues to show its impact.

Carroll’s achievement reflects a broader pattern of success among UTA Anthropology alumni, who have consistently earned highly competitive national and international research funding. In 2025, alumna Michelle Hoskins (BA Anthropology, 2023) became the program’s fifth recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in the past 15 years—an indicator of the program’s strength in preparing students for advanced research careers.

For Carroll, the Leakey Foundation grant represents both a continuation of her work and a new chapter—one that now centers her research in Sicily while building on field experiences across Africa.

Her recognition underscores the role of faculty mentorship, experiential learning, and sustained research opportunities in shaping the next generation of scholars in anthropology and human origins research.