Dr. Michelle LeFebvre is the Assistant Curator of Caribbean Archaeology, as well as the South Florida Archaeology and Ethnography collections at the Florida Museum of Natural History (FM). She is also the Director of the FM’s Randell Research Center and is an affiliate of the UF Department of Anthropology.

LeFebvre’s research interests are centered within the synergy of culture and biology through time. She investigates long-term trends in human procurement, consumption, and use of natural resources as a way to better understand and model relationships between humans and their environment. To date, the majority of her research has focused on Indigenous  fisheries and mammal biodiversity within the Caribbean and Florida, creating anthropogenic baselines of aquatic vertebrate exploitation and wild mammal translocation and management.

Her research program is explicitly shaped by interdisciplinary collaborations, methods, and data, including archaeological settlement patterns, archaeological and contemporary biodiversity specimens and records, ethnohistoric records, biochemical, geochemical, and chronometric datasets, as well as informatics. The data generated through her research is of transdisciplinary significance and contributes to empirical understandings of 1) how past human activities and environmental circumstance were linked and inform both historical and current patterns of animal biodiversity and ecology (e.g., animal biogeography, management, and domestication), and 2) how such links were embedded within human cultural practices (e.g., social interaction and movement, settlement patterns, and landscape development) and social conceptions (e.g., identity, food).