Dr. Lesciotto’s research spans three areas: forensic anthropology, craniofacial growth and development, and anatomy education. Dr. Lesciotto is an active forensic anthropologist, combining casework and skeletal research to improve methods for estimating sex from skeletal remains. Her current projects focus on examining the intersection of forensic anthropology and the US legal system, validating existing sex estimation methods, defining new osteological traits, and integrating morphological and metric skeletal traits using new statistical models. Dr. Lesciotto’s research on craniofacial growth focuses on pre- and perinatal interactions between the developing brain and skull using mice as a model organism. Through this work, she investigates hypotheses related to how encephalization may have influenced craniofacial morphology over the course of hominin evolution. Finally, alongside colleagues at multiple institutions, Dr. Lesciotto has investigated the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on anatomy education and how educators handled the shift of a traditionally hands-on, three-dimensional learning environment in a dissection lab to two-dimensional online modalities. This project has expanded to explore how adaptations to learning during Covid-19 may have fundamentally altered pedagogical philosophies within anatomy and medical education.