Rate My Professor Melandri Vlok

Dr. Melandri Vlok served as Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus, from January 2024 to February 2025. She earned her PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Otago in 2020, complemented by a BA/BSc with Honours. Vlok's research centers on bioarchaeology and paleopathology, with a focus on the prevalence and dynamics of nutritional deficiencies and infectious diseases in ancient Asia-Pacific populations amid agricultural transitions and climate shifts. Utilizing macroscopic skeletal analysis, radiography, and biomolecular methods like genomics and proteomics, her work examines conditions such as scurvy, hypomineralization disorders, thalassemia, yaws, malaria, and leprosy. She has conducted extensive fieldwork across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Japan, contributing to projects that reveal early evidence of surgical interventions and disease origins.

Prior appointments include Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney's Sydney Southeast Asia Centre from November 2021 to December 2023, investigating the evolutionary history of yaws and malaria, and Fellow in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Otago from October 2020 to November 2021, involving Māori and Moriori repatriation and analysis of 19th-century medical data. Key publications encompass 'Surgical amputation of a limb 31,000 years ago in Borneo' (Nature, 2022), documenting the earliest known deliberate limb amputation; 'High prevalence of adult and nonadult scurvy in an early agricultural transition site from Mainland Southeast Asia' (American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2024); 'Hypomineralization disorder in tropical Southeast Asia during the agricultural revolution' (International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 2024); and 'Nutritional deficiency and ecological stress in the Middle to Final western Jomon' (Antiquity, 2024). Vlok was named a National Geographic Explorer, receiving a grant in 2018 for Vietnamese research. Her contributions enhance paleoepidemiology and inform contemporary health resilience against climate-driven disease patterns. She possesses over a decade of teaching experience in anatomy, physiology, public health, archaeology, and biological anthropology.