 In 2007 he was appointed the director of Kent State's new anthropology institute, the "Matthew Ferrini Institute For Human Evolutionary Research".In addition, he is part of a team that has conducted 17 years of biological analysis of Ardi ("Ardipithecus ramidus")--a near-complete 4.4-million-year-old hominid fossil found in present-day Ethiopia.Publication of a special issue of "Science" in October 2009 about this research demonstrated that hominid history was nearly one million years older than believed, and provided new information on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.