Sausage of Science Human Biology Association

Chris and Cristina interview Taiye Winful, a PhD Candidate at Vanderbilt University, who studies stress and embodiment in African and other Black populations. Taiye completed her bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology from Loyola University Chicago and MA degree in Anthropology from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Taiye’s Master’s thesis was titled “Reconstructing Africa’s Evolutionary Histories: DNA Collection, Coding, Analysis, and Interpretation.” Her thesis focused on generating a comprehensive bio-culturally informed set of African DNA databases that reflected continental and diasporic African genomic diversity. Taiye’s current research interests include genetics, race, health, embodiment, and health disparities. Her dissertation focuses on understanding how life experiences translate into physiological systems via stress in Black populations. She explores the biological mechanisms that connect stress and health, specifically focusing on how social and environmental factors can lead to epigenetic changes in inflammatory-related biomarkers.

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Find the works discussed in this episode:

Winful, Taiye, "Bioethics as a Dynamic Issue: Holistic Approaches to Understanding and Applying Ethics to Study Design" (2024). Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints. 208.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol_preprints/208

Winful, T.; Sorunke, M.; Benn Torres, J. “The Impacts of Stress on Salivary CRP Variability in a Nigerian Population” (in prep).

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Contact Taiye: olawunmi.winful@vanderbilt.edu
Twitter: @twinanthro
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc

Chris Lynn, Co-Host
Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, E-mail: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Cristina Gildee, Guest Co-Host, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
Website: cristinagildee.org, E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu, Twitter:@CristinaGildee

How can marmosets inform human birth experiences? Are there really four types of human pelvises? What happens when primates birth litters?

Prof. Julienne Rutherford joins Chris and Eric to answer these questions and more!

Find the articles discussed on this episode via the following citations:

Rutherford, J.N., Ross, C.N., Ziegler, T., Burke, L.A., Steffen, A.D., Sills, A., Layne Colon, D., Demartelly, V.A., Narapareddy, L.R. and Tardif, S.D., 2021. Womb to womb: Maternal litter size and birth weight but not adult characteristics predict early neonatal death of offspring in the common marmoset monkey. Plos one, 16(6), p.e0252093.

VanSickle, C., Liese, K.L. and Rutherford, J.N., 2022. Textbook typologies: challenging the myth of the perfect obstetric pelvis. The Anatomical Record, 305(4), pp.952-967.

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Dr. Julienne Rutherford is Professor and John & Nell Mitchell Endowed Chair for Pediatric Nursing in the University of Arizona College of Nursing. She is a biological anthropologist whose work integrates bioanthropological theory with biomedical science. For 20 years, she has sustained a program of research exploring the intrauterine environment as a biosocial determinant of health. She studies how maternal life history and lived experience shape this earliest developmental setting, and how, in turn, the intrauterine environment influences growth, health, and development across the life course and across generations.

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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc

Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair
Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, E-mail: cdlynn at ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
E-mail: eric.griffith at duke.edu

Prof. Lesley Gregoricka joins Chris and Eric to explain her work in the field of bioarchaeology. Topics include everything from strontium isotope analysis to the ethics of legacy collections of human remains. Stick around for a diversion to King Cakes and Mardis Gras.

The article discussed on this episode can be found via this citation:

Gregoricka, L. A. (2023). The ethics of excavating: bioarchaeology and the case for rehabilitating legacy human skeletal collections in the Near East. Levant, 55(3), 294-303.

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Bioarchaeologist Dr. Lesley Gregoricka is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of South Alabama. Her research focuses on prehistoric mortuary practices and the chemistry of ancient human teeth and bones to examine changing patterns of mobility and the evolution of social complexity in Arabia and the broader Middle East.

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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc

Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair
Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, E-mail: cdlynn at ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
E-mail: eric.griffith at duke.edu

Chris and Eric catch up with Dr. Melanie Martin, an Associate Professor in the University of Washington Department of Anthropology, whose research examines biocultural influences on health, growth, and development across the life course. In addition to being the Co-PI of the Biodemography Lab at the University of Washington Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, she conducts field research with two international projects on Indigenous community health and well-being: the Chaco Area Reproductive Ecology Program (Co-Director) and the Tsimane Health and Life History Project (Affiliate). In this episode, Dr. Martin breaks down two of her papers, one looking at COVID-19 transmission in mothers and infants and another examining sleep health in undergraduates before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Find the papers discussed in this episode:

Martin MA, Keith M, Pace RM, Williams JE, Ley SH, Barbosa-Leiker C, Caffé B, Smith CB, Kunkle A, Lackey KA, Navarrete AD, Pace CDW, Gogel AC, Eisenberg DTA, Fehrenkamp BD, McGuire MA, McGuire MK, Meehan CL and Brindle E (2022) SARS-CoV-2 specific antibody trajectories in mothers and infants over two months following maternal infection. Front. Immunol. 13:1015002. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2022.1015002

Alicia Rice, Olivia Sather, Kenneth P Wright, Céline Vetter, Melanie A Martin, Horacio O de la Iglesia, COVID-19 stay-at-home restrictions increase the alignment in sleep and light exposure between school days and weekends in university students, Sleep, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2023, zsad059, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsad059
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Contact Melanie: martinm7@uw.edu
Website: https://www.melaniemartin-anthropologist.com/
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc

Chris Lynn, Co-Host,
Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, E-mail: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Eric Griffith, Guest Co-Host, HBA Junior Fellow
E-mail: eric.griffith@duke.edu

Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
Website: cristinagildee.org, E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu, Twitter:@CristinaGildee

Listeners, please welcome Prof. Ben Trumble to the show! Prof. Trumble joins us to talk about his fascinating research on how oral health can affect cardiovascular disease risk and cognitive health later in life.

Find the publication discussed in today’s episode via this citation:

Benjamin C Trumble, Matthew Schwartz, Andrew T Ozga, Gary T Schwartz, Christopher M Stojanowski, Carrie L Jenkins, Thomas S Kraft, Angela R Garcia, Daniel K Cummings, Paul L Hooper, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Kenneth Buetow, Bret Beheim, Andrei Irimia, Gregory S Thomas, Randall C Thompson, HORUS Team, Margaret Gatz, Jonathan Stieglitz, Caleb E Finch, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan.

Poor oral health is associated with inflammation, aortic valve calcification, and brain volume among forager-farmers, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 2024;, glae013, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1093/gerona/glae013

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Benjamin Trumble is an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Center for Evolution and Medicine and the Institute of Human Origins.

His work focuses on chronic diseases of aging, working to understand how environmental conditions like parasites, pathogens, food availability, and social interactions impact human health. Taking an evolutionary life history perspective, he uses field and laboratory studies to understand variation in human endocrine systems, and how this influences chronic health conditions like benign prostatic hyperplasia, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s dementia.

Prof. Trumble's website can be found here: https://trumblelab.org/

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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc

Courtney Manthey-Pierce, Co-Host,
Website: courtneymanthey-pierce.godaddysites.com/ E-mail: cpierce4@uccs.edu, Twitter: @HolyLaetoli

Alex Niclou, special returning Co-Host

Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
E-mail: eric.griffith at duke.edu

Cara and guest co-host Cristina sit down with Dr. Chris Kuzawa, the John D. MacArthur Professor & Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He uses principles from anthropology and evolutionary biology to gain insights into the biological and health impacts of human developmental plasticity. His primary field research is conducted in Cebu, the Philippines, where he and his colleagues work with a large birth cohort study that enrolled more than 3,000 pregnant women in 1983 and has since followed their offspring into adulthood (now 30 years old). They use the nearly 3 decades of data available for each study participant, and recruitment of generation 3 (the grand offspring of the original mothers), to gain a better understanding of the long-term and intergenerational impacts of early life environments on adult biology, life history, reproduction, and health. A theme of much of his work is the application of principles of developmental plasticity and evolutionary biology to issues of health.

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Contact Chris: kuzawa@northwestern.edu
Website: https://sites.northwestern.edu/kuzawa/; Twitter:@ChrisKuzawa
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc

Cara Ocobock, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair,
Cara Ocobock, Co-Host, Website: sites.nd.edu/cara-ocobock/, Email:cocobock@nd.edu, Twitter: @CaraOcobock

Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
Website: cristinagildee.org, E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu, Twitter: @CristinaGildee