I am biocultural anthropologist and human biologist whose research focuses on the political and household ecology of health and livelihoods in East African communities, including perceptions of resource scarcity, resilience, and how socioecological transformations are embodied in variations of human health, nutrition, and growth. I came to UF as a Medical Anthropologist in 2008 after completing my PhD in Biological Anthropology at the University of Arizona.
My work brings together evolutionary theory, developmental biology, and the sociocultural construction of risk to understand how perceptions of uncertainty and scarcity shape the dynamics of household ecology and the allocation of time and resources among family members. I use the caretaker-infant dyad as an integrative framework for understanding the links between household ecology and health. To do this, I focus on the various ways that the harm reduction strategies used to deal with scarcity and risk are translated into human biology through social transmission and the intergenerational effects of maternal health, mother-infant interaction, and young child growth and development.
This research began with a multi-year study of how variations in the household ecology of semi-nomadic Datoga influence the both the health of children under two years of age and maternal perceptions/responses to young child vulnerability. As part of this, I examined how maternal perceptions of infant vulnerability link to clinical measures of child well-being, and the nutritional consequences of the various strategies mothers use to balance the needs of a pastoral household against the demands of individual children. The original project ran from 2004-2006, but I have continued to follow the growth and development of these same children over the past five years.
Recently, I have also been involved in a multinational project funded by a seed grant from the Livestock-Climate Change Collaborative Research Support Program (LCC-CRSP) that examines the interactions between climate change, livelihood decisions and child health among pastoral communities in Niger and Tanzania, as well as the fourth phase of the Global Ethnohydrology Study, which focuses on lay perceptions of water quality, environmental contamination, and human-animal health linkages across several sites around the world.
I teach a number of graduate and undergraduate courses at UF including: Culture & Medicine, Anthropology of Global Health, Global Issues in Pastoralism, Evolutionary Medicine, Human Sexuality & Culture, and Maternal Health & Nutrition.
