Baylee Priest is a second-year PhD student in anthropological archaeology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before attending UIUC, she received her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Kentucky in 2021. Her prior experiences in archaeology have taken her across opposite sides of America, and include professional positions in cultural resource management (CRM), offices of state archaeology, and museums, with her experience and research primarily located in Kentucky. 

Her research interests broadly surround the entanglement of climate change, sociopolitical stress, and human mobility and migration. She applies these matters to her research within the mid-continental "Vacant Quarter" and the human depopulation that took place between approximately 1300 and 1450 CE, focusing specifically on western Kentucky's chronology and environment.