UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — During her teens, Courtney Elmore found herself adrift — homeless and working a grueling shift at a potato chip factory in rural Minnesota. At that fragile moment of her young life, what she needed most was a support system, which she said she found through a rural dairy farming family who took her in and helped put her on the path to a more promising life.
That road ultimately led her to Penn State, where Elmore, an Air Force veteran, wife and mother of four, became a student in the Department of Anthropology’s integrated undergraduate-graduate program.
Elmore, who earned her bachelor’s degree and served as the anthropology major marshal at last spring's commencement, will receive her master’s degree on Sunday, May 10, at the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School’s spring 2026 commencement. This fall, she’ll begin pursuing a dual-title doctoral degree in anthropology and demography.
A few weeks ago, Elmore received a U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program fellowship that will fully fund her doctoral studies and dissertation research in South Africa next summer. Her scholarship focuses on social networks and social capital, with a particular interest in understanding how these systems influence well-being and how they can be leveraged to foster stronger, more connected communities.
“I’m very excited about the fellowship because I definitely think this is something that can help the people I care about,” Elmore said. “I’ve always been interested in cooperation. In the military you get this sense of camaraderie that you honestly don’t get outside of it. And I also got a sense of that through the rural communities I’ve been exposed to.”
Elmore works as a graduate assistant in the Human Sociality Lab, a joint-university venture co-directed by Penn State Assistant Professor of Anthropology Anne Pisor and Washington State University Assistant Professor of Anthropology Kristopher Smith.
Pisor said Elmore is a deeply committed student.
"Courtney is always looking out for others, like her lab mates, her graduate student peers and her fellow veterans navigating higher education,” Pisor said. “This extends to the research she does, where she studies how social support, or lack of it, affects well-being in rural communities around the globe. Courtney is a leader, a scholar and a mentor to the core, and service is her north star."
A self-described “Air Force brat” due to her father’s service, Elmore said she got an early taste of anthropology through the different cultures she experienced growing up on various European military bases.
Her own military calling occurred during her time in Minnesota, when she came upon an Air Force recruiting table while attending an air show. Tired of being “greasy and smelly and making minimum wage at the potato chip factory,” she said, she decided to go for it.
Elmore went on to serve as a geospatial intelligence analyst during the most intense years of the Iraq War. Though stationed in Hawaii and California, her work required an aircraft- and drone-enabled view of battlefield carnage.
“That was rough,” Elmore said. “You’re watching human devastation from the eagle eye and can’t look away.”
She said there were good parts to her experience, though, including meeting her husband, Michael. After they had their second child, Elmore left the Air Force to become a stay-at-home mom.
While living in Florida, Elmore started her own photography business, which thrived until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. During that same period, she said, her sister, who had been diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder ankylosing spondylitis, died by suicide. Not long after that, Elmore herself was diagnosed with the disease, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the spine and can affect other joints.
In the midst of that, she, her husband and their children — Logan, 18, Noah, 12, Madison, 11, Benjamin, 9 — moved to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Once she settled in her new surroundings and found a medicinal regimen that worked for her, Elmore decided she needed a new life challenge.
“I started to think, ‘Where is my purpose now?’” she said. “So, I applied to Penn State to go to school for anthropology, which had always been a pipe dream of mine. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Indiana Jones.”
Elmore quickly found her stride in the classroom and sped through her undergraduate coursework in just two years. Along the way, she said, she looked back to the stability and support she found on the dairy farm in Minnesota to develop her research focus on how rural communities can develop resilience in the face of rapid societal, economic, technological and environmental changes.
“My research is looking at how we can navigate these intensely fast-moving changes and if the ways we cooperated in the past can keep up,” Elmore said.
For her master’s scholarly paper, Elmore researched the differences in social capital and networks between men and women in rural villages in Tanzania. There, she said, a man with social capital can receive assistance for monetary and tool loans, while a woman can get food or monetary assistance when her child is sick.
“The systems are built different, but it’s how we survive and cooperate as humans,” she said. “For instance, when men migrate into a village, they actually get a penalty for moving. They lose their network and it’s harder for them to rebuild it. It’s seemingly a lot harder for them than women, because the system that’s persisted throughout the eons is that women move to their husband’s village. And there are strategies that have been put in place for generations to help ease the transition for women. I don’t think that’s something men are explicitly taught in the same way women are.”
Elmore said she will continue that focus for her dissertation, traveling to Agincourt, South Africa, to examine whether agricultural communities that expand their income generation to other markets see a detrimental effect in terms of overall resilience and cohesion.
“What we’re seeing is that some people in these communities are participating in a wage labor market and choosing not to participate in their local community,” she said. “I want to go in see what the issues are and some of the conflicts that arise from that.”
Beyond her studies, Elmore works as a graduate assistant in the University’s Office of Veterans Programs. She said she thoroughly enjoys working with fellow vets, and is currently writing a how-to guide for veteran students interested in applying to graduate school.
“I know for me it was kind of hard to adjust to college — just the mentor part alone. So, what we’ve been trying to do is demystify the process for veterans,” said Elmore, who also serves as the community advocate for the National Veterans Leadership Foundation and will speak at its annual conference in June.
Elmore will spend the coming academic year writing her dissertation proposal before traveling to South Africa in summer 2027. Looking ahead, she said, she’d love nothing more than a career in academia.
“I love Penn State; I don’t want to leave,” Elmore said with a laugh. “All around, it’s just a great place, and it’s been a completely refreshing change of pace to have people believe in me. As a stay-at-home mom, you don’t believe much in yourself or feel the validation that you’re doing a good job. This is the best thing I’ve ever had the chance to do, and I want to continue doing it for a lot longer.”