If you spend any time at the Bryn Mawr or Haverford campuses, you’ll hear someone mention “the Bi-Co.”
Short for Bi-College Consortium, the Bi-Co allows students from both campuses to take classes, major or minor, eat, and participate in campus life at either campus.
Every year, students take advantage of this unique partnership, and for some, it plays a key role in their enrollment decision.
When Levi Raskin (HC ’24) was in high school, he was able to do research with world-renowned expert in paleoanthropology, Professor Zeray Alemseged, at the University of Chicago and became hooked on the field.
He knew he wanted to attend a liberal arts college, and all the ones that accepted him, including Haverford, had anthropology departments. However, none had faculty members whose research was specifically focused on the field that most interested Raskin. But Bryn Mawr did.
“Bryn Mawr had the faculty I wanted to work with and the courses I needed,” he says. “It became pretty clear that this was where I wanted to major.”
"The kind of work I wanted to do—connecting anthropology with evolutionary biology—was only possible at Bryn Mawr.”
“Our Anthropology department has expertise in archaeological, biological, cultural and linguistic anthropology, which is a rarity among small liberal arts colleges,” says Associate Professor of Anthropology Maja Šešelj. “Because of that, we have students from across the Tri-Co regularly taking our courses. In every cohort we have at least one major from Haverford, and occasionally even a major from Swarthmore."
At Bryn Mawr, Raskin took classes and conducted research with Šešelj, a biological anthropologist whose primary research interest is the evolution of the modern human pattern of growth and development.
“Maja was incredibly generous with her time and helped connect me with others in the field,” Raskin says. “She created space for me to follow my own ideas and supported me every step of the way.”
In his junior year, Raskin added a second major in biology after discovering a love for computational methods and genetics through work in Assistant Professor Bárbara Domingues Bitarello’s lab.
As is so often the case at Bryn Mawr, the interactions between students and faculty both in and outside the classroom played a pivotal role for everyone.
“I remember we had one of those quintessential post-class conversations in the hallway where an off-handed comment about an academic peeve of mine led him to look into phylogenetic methods, teach himself programming in R over winter break, take classes with Bárbara, and switch his planned Bio minor to a second major,” recalls Šešelj. ‘It is remarkable how such seemingly small things can have a snowball effect, in this case not just on Levi but on Barbára and me as well.”
Working with Šešelj and Domingues Bitarello, Raskin pursued multiple research projects that combined computational biology, evolutionary theory, and fossil data.
As an undergraduate student, Levi presented a poster at the Society for American Archaeology in Portland, Oregon, in 2023. The presentation was based on research funded by Bryn Mawr and Haverford that Levi had done the summer before his junior year at the Koobi Fora Field School in Kenya.
In March of his senior year, Raskin presented his research on methods for inferring evolutionary trees with Šešelj and Domingues Bitarello at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society, and just days after, the results of a side project on great apes at the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) in Los Angeles.
Now a Ph.D. student in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkley, Raskin continues to search for answers to questions he began asking at Bryn Mawr.
“The dream,” he says, “is to scan a fossil and have a computer program tell you where it fits on the evolutionary tree.”
In March 2025, Raskin presented the results of his senior thesis research at the AABA annual meeting in Baltimore, where he won a student award for this work. This September, he’s going to the European Society for Human Evolution conference in Paris, where an abstract by him, Domingues Bitarello, Šešelj, and his Ph.D. advisor Professor John Huelsenbeck has been accepted. Recently, he was selected as one of only 30 U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellows, a highly prestigious, four-year fellowship for students recognized for their potential to become leaders in the field of computational sciences.
From his first anthropology class taken online during the pandemic to computational biology seminars and a joint senior capstone project, Raskin built a foundation for his dreams of becoming a scholar and researcher at Bryn Mawr.
“That first anthropology class completely changed the trajectory of my work,” he recalls. “It led me to question assumptions in the field and develop my own research project to test them. The kind of work I wanted to do—connecting anthropology with evolutionary biology—was only possible at Bryn Mawr.”