Claira Ralston, Ph.D., is a biological anthropologist who specializes in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College (2011); M.S. in Forensic Anthropology from Boston University School of Medicine (2016); and received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2023. Her research broadly addresses issues of inequity, identity, health and disease, marginalization, structural violence, settler colonialism and creeping genocide in the North American Southwest using osteological and mortuary data. In 2022, she co-authored a volume in the Routledge Bodies and Lives series, titled Gender Violence in the American Southwest (AD 1100-1300): Mothers Sisters, Wives, Slaves, which presents a nuanced case study of gender violence through a biocultural and intersectional lens. Her dissertation research focused on how social institutions shaped gendered experiences of disease and trauma among the Ancestral occupants of Turkey Creek Pueblo (AZ W:9:123/AZ W:10:78) (n=266), the earliest aggregated pueblo in the Point of Pines area of the Mogollon region (AD 1225-1286). Since 2016, she has also served as the site supervisor for the Historic Belen Bioarchaeology Project, a National Science Foundation funded community-engaged project examining the physiological consequences of Spanish colonial programs of marginalization, domination, and assimilation within a community of freed Indigenous indentured servants and slaves known as Genízaros.