Sausage of Science Human Biology Association

Chris welcomes guest co-host, Cristina Gildee, to chat with Sofiya Shreyer, a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Sofiya is passionate about increasing research and education on menopause and other understudied women's health issues, such as PCOS, endometriosis, and sexual wellness. Under the guidance of Dr. Lynnette Sievert, she studies grandmotherhood, variation in caretaking behaviors, and the impact of child-rearing on both grandmaternal and children’s health and well-being. With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Sofiya’s work toggled to focus on the study of menopause, where she manages and coordinates an ongoing multi-year study on hot flash experiences and brown adipose tissue in perimenopausal and menopausal women.
Find her recent book chapter, “Aging and Childcare: A Biocultural Approach to Grandmothering in Ukraine” published in Anthropological Perspectives on Aging here: https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069593
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Sofiya’s email: sshreyer@umass.edu
Twitter: @sofiya_shreyer
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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/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Chris and Mallika sit down with Sean Prall, an Assistant Professor and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Missouri. His interests center on human health and reproduction, reproductive decision-making, and evolutionary ecology. He examines costs and trade-offs associated with investments in reproduction. He utilizes a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including anthropometrics, demography, endocrinology, actigraphy, validated health surveys, and dyadic peer ratings, alongside semi-structured demographic interviews and measures of social norms. Sean’s work is informed by a mix of evolutionary and behavioral ecology, cultural evolutionary theory, and evolutionary psychology, especially related to reproductive concerns. Sean is also a co-director of the Kunene Rural Health and Demography Project, a contributor to the ENDOW project, and a collaborator on the Shodagor Longitudinal Health and Demography Project.

Find the publications discussed in today’s episode here: https://sprall.github.io
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Sean’s email: sprall@missouri.edu
Twitter: @ssprall
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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/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal

Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu

Drs. Karen Rosenberg and Wenda Trevathan join the show to discuss their work examining the evolution of human childbirth and infant helplessness. They also preview some of the content that will appear in their forthcoming (untitled) book. Title suggestions are welcome!

Information about their previous publication Costly and Cute can be found here: https://sarweb.org/costly-cute/

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Karen Rosenberg is a biological anthropologist with a specialty in paleoanthropology. She received her degrees from the University of Chicago (B.A. 1976) and the University of Michigan (M.A. 1980, Ph.D., 1986) and has taught at the University of Delaware since 1987. She has studied human fossils and modern human skeletal material in museums in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa. Her research interests are in the origin of modern humans and the evolution of modern human childbirth and human infant helplessness. She has published in edited volumes as well as anthropological and clinical obstetrical journals.

Wenda Trevathan is Regents Professor (emerita) of Anthropology at New Mexico State University and a biological anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on the evolutionary and biocultural factors underlying human reproduction including childbirth, maternal behavior, sexuality, and menopause. Her primary publications include works on the evolution of childbirth and evolutionary medicine. She is a co-editor of two collections of works on evolutionary medicine (Oxford University Press, 1999 and 2008) and published the book Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health (Oxford University Press) in 2010. She currently serves as a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is writing a book on infancy in evolutionary perspective with Karen Rosenberg.

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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/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Mallika Sarma, Sausage of Science Co-Host
Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal

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

Chris and Mallika chat with Florence Lee, a PhD candidate at the University of Albany (SUNY), to discuss her collaboration with the Akwasane Task Force on the Environment. Their work investigates pollutant exposure and autoimmunity in Akwesasne Mohawk women. In this episode, Florence discusses the biological consequences of a century of DDT and PCB contamination along the St. Lawrence River for the indigenous women who continue to live there.
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Find the publication discussed in today’s episode here:
“Associations between autoimmune dysfunction and pollutants in Akwesasne Mohawk women: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and polychlorinated biphenyl exposure” https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23773
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Florence's email: flee2@albany.edu
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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/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal

Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu

Elizabeth Holdsworth, PhD, joins the Sausage of Science to chat about her new paper titled “Maternal–infant interaction quality is associated with child NR3C1 CpG site methylation at 7 years of age.”

The paper can be found at the AJHB website here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajhb.23876

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Dr. Elizabeth Holdsworth is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Meehan lab at Washington State University. Elizabeth is a researcher of mother-infant relationships, infant growth, and the early life origins of health. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University at Albany, SUNY, for her biocultural anthropological research into how mothers’ unequal exposure to stress can affect maternal health, as well as contribute to small changes in infant growth through epigenetic mechanisms. Her current research identifies how maternal-infant dynamics and maternal stress may contribute to variation in the milk microbiome.

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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/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Mallika Sarma, Sausage of Science Co-Host
Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal

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

Chris and Mallika bring back repeat offender Dr. Stephanie Levy an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, a faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center Department of Anthropology, and a core faculty member of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP). Dr. Levy returns to catch us up on her recent work in human energetics, biological adaptation, circumpolar populations, seasonality, social influences on health disparities, cardiometabolic health, and climate change. She graciously shares her experiences and research as a co-PI on the Indigenous Siberian Health and Adaptation Project (ISHAP), a collaborative project that includes researchers based in Russia and the U.S.

In this episode, we learn about her research exploring how environmental conditions across the life course influence population variation in metabolism and disease risk. Dr. Levy’s work investigates human evolution, adaptation, and health by integrating energetics and endocrinology tools to foster comparative research that examines how ecological and social environments shape biological variation across human populations and primate species.
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Find the publication discussed in today’s episode here:
“Brown adipose tissue thermogenesis among young adults in northeastern Siberia and Midwest United States and its relationship with other biological adaptations to cold climates” https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23723
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Dr. Levy’s email: stephanie.levy@hunter.cuny.edu
Website: https://www.levyhumanbiologylab.com/
Twitter: @slevyscience
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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/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal

Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu