Bio & Credentials
Meet Our Anthropologists
William D. Stevens, Ph.D.
Deputy Coroner & Forensic Anthropologist
Dr. William D. Stevens is a biological and forensic anthropologist with over two decades of field and case experience. Since 1999, he has served as a forensic anthropologist and medicolegal death investigator for the Richland County Coroner’s Office.
Dr. Stevens holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Georgia. His professional interests include forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and historic archaeology.
His work extends internationally, having served as a forensic consultant for the United Nations in Cyprus and a volunteer for the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, helping to recover and identify remains from periods of war and human rights conflict. In South Carolina, he regularly consults with local law enforcement, state, and federal agencies.
Madeline M. Atwell, Ph.D.
Deputy Coroner & Forensic Anthropologist
Dr. Madeline Atwell is a biological and forensic anthropologist with expertise in human skeletal remains and decomposition. For the past seven years, she has served the Richland County Coroner’s Office in addition to assisting agencies across South Carolina with forensic archaeological search and recoveries, human identification, and skeletal trauma analysis.
She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina (2022) and completed a National Institute of Justice-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at Clemson University in 2025. Her work at Clemson contributed to geoFOR, a forensic taphonomy database and machine learning model focused on human decomposition and time-since-death estimation.
In addition to applied forensic anthropology, Dr. Atwell’s academic research investigates skeletal trauma and disease in archaeological and anatomical skeletal collections across the United States. Her work explores biosocial questions regarding marginalization and structural violence towards institutionalized women of the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. Dr. Atwell also serves as a bioarchaeology consultant for archaeological sites and instructs anthropology courses at the university level.
