Elizabeth Bingham Thomas

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology

Elizabeth Thomas chose to major in Anthropology because she fell in love with the research that accompanies it. In 2015, she joined the USU Collaborative Anthropological Research Lab, directed by Dr. Francois Dengah. In lab, she has developed qualitative and quantitative research skills. Over the course of the 2016-2017 academic year, she has led a team of students working on Dr. Dengah’s National Science Foundation-funded project mapping the functional genome of video gamers. In 2016, she co-authored a paper published in the journal Annals of Anthropological Practice. She also works as a qualitative research assistant for Dr. Yanghee Kim and Dr. Sherry Marx in the College of Education for they study culture brokering among kindergartners of different cultural backgrounds. Elizabeth’s personal research focuses on the Mormon media culture and immigrant acculturation. Her Honors thesis examines the acculturation process of Latino immigrants. She wants to identify expectations and assumptions that Americans and immigrants have of the acculturation process. She has presented her research at the annual meeting for the American Anthropological Association, the flagship association for the field of anthropology. She also presents at numerous other conferences, such as the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research.