Nerli Paredes Ruvalcaba is a second-year graduate student who received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship last year and is now preparing to conduct her pre-dissertation research. Nerli was awarded support to participate in the NSF diversity program, IDEAS, which she describes below.

I first became interested in anthropology as an undergraduate at the University of California, Riverside. A class with Dr. Robin Nelson introduced me to topics related to parent-child interactions. I had recently become a mother and I was extremely interested in those topics. Dr. Nelson’s class also assured me that even though biological anthropology had a dark history of institutional racism, new scholars are actively changing the discipline to be more inclusive. Hence, pursuing a degree in anthropology would allow me to ask challenging questions that would be relevant for marginalized communities. Dr. Nelson also gave me the opportunity to discuss with her research articles I would find outside of class. After reading the work of Dr. Fujita, I was attracted to the idea of studying breast milk components from a biocultural perspective.

I began working in Dr. Fujita’s Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research my first semester at MSU. I helped with literature search and writing for grants submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, both of which were successfully funded. This year my role expanded to include processing whole milk to milk serum, which is then used to run assays.
During my first year I was awarded the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship. This was thanks to the advice of multiple mentors, but mainly thanks to the endless help of Dr. Fujita, who read multiple drafts and offered generous feedback. I stated that I am interested in assessing changes of iron levels in human milk from short-term to long-term breastfeeding. Research suggests that iron-deficiency is a predictor of child stunting, which is associated with impaired health and cognitive development.

Having a supportive community is imperative; as Latina in a predominately White institution it
is easy for me to feel excluded. Therefore, I try my best to make sure that I am involved in programs that are committed to working with marginalized communities. I have been involved with the Michigan Indigenous/Chicanx Community Alliance (MICCA), where I help organize culturally relevant events that bring together students, staff, and community. By creating events such as the celebration for ‘Dia De Los Muertos’, we hope to give students a sense of belonging and form a community at MSU. I have also participated in conferences and workshops targeted at emboldening students from underrepresented backgrounds to apply to graduate schools. I am also a mentor for the MSU Indigenous Youth Empowerment Program, where we help young students with academics and cultural activities.

Fortunately, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Association of Physical Anthropology (AAPA) are also dedicated to increasing and supporting diversity within our discipline. This year, I have been selected to be part of a new program titled Increasing Diversity in Evolutionary Anthropology (IDEAS). This program aims to support underrepresented minority students who are committed to diversity with additional training and mentorship. The IDEAS Program provides students with a stipend to attend the 2017 AAPA meeting in New Orleans to attend a one-day workshop with mentoring groups. I will participate in discussions with other experts in the field of biological anthropology who are also interested in supporting diversity. I hope to learn to be a successful scholar while simultaneously advocating for underrepresented communities. I am also looking forward to conversations on how to become an ethical anthropologist within academia and the broader community. I am hopeful that the opportunity to learn from experts in the field of biological anthropology during my first years of graduate school will prepare me to reach my future goal of becoming a professor at a research institution.

Overall, I feel incredibly honored to have supportive mentors and in the future I plan to give back to the community that continuously supports me, and to the students of color who will come after me.

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In 2011 Dr. Masako Fujita founded the Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research, where she and her students could conduct cutting edge anthropology research using biomarkers: measurable biochemical substances in bodies that can indicate various aspects of health. Recent grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Science Foundation are funding two separate projects that together will address how variations in the beneficial contents of human milk, like antibodies and vitamins, relate to maternal health and the sex of the infant. There are substantial disparities in child mortality related to household income and sex of the infant, particularly in places in the world where gender discrimination and malnutrition are common. One contributing factor may be the level of protection that children receive from their mothers’ milk. One of the components now being measured in the lab is milk sIgA, an antibody that helps with immune protection for infants.

The study uses archived samples from rural communities in Kenya where the overwhelming majority of the mothers breastfeed their infants long-term. Dr. Fujita collected the samples as a doctoral student while investigating the link between the vitamin A levels of mothers and that of their breast milk. Vitamin A deficiency is one of the leading global health problems. It can cause night blindness and other serious complications such as compromised immune protection against infectious diseases. At the time of her dissertation research, the World Health Organization was recommending that all postpartum mothers be given a single high dose vitamin A supplement in the hopes of increasing infant vitamin A intake through breast milk and reducing child mortality. Dr. Fujita’s research, along with other studies, helped clarify that the vitamin A levels of breast milk depleted rapidly despite the supplementation, so the intervention was not significantly increasing vitamin A levels or reducing mortality in infants. The WHO has subsequently abandoned this recommendation based on the accumulating evidence that this pharmaceutical approach was not effective or sustainable.

Dr. Fujita wanted to investigate how other milk components might further shed new light on maternal and infant health. In rural Kenya, mothers are living in difficult conditions. Droughts, famine and infections are common, straining women’s ability to maintain adequate nutrition. Her overarching research interest focuses on how women “make do” nutritionally under these harsh conditions. Mothers have to manage their own and their children’s nutrition through behaviors, diet, and food allocation, but their bodies also “manage” nutrients through lactation. She hopes to better understand the conditions that affect the transfer of biological resources, like antibodies and micronutrients, from mothers to infants through breastmilk.

The Biomarker Lab currently employs two graduate (Nerli Paredes and Sabrina Perlman) and four undergraduate students. With blood and milk samples from 220 individuals to assess for six different biomarkers (sIgA, protein, lactose, and folate binding protein in milk, and folate and prolactin in blood), there are over a thousand specimens to be processed for assays in the current projects. Students learn to make serum from milk, prep the assays, run the centrifuge, manage data, label samples, and keep the lab organized.

This training opens new possibilities for the students. Savannah Sass is one undergraduate with an interest in forensic science. She’s considering a career as a medical examiner and is now getting first-hand lab experience and invaluable mentoring from Dr. Fujita. Grad student Nerli Paredes plans to conduct research on breast milk herself, and is designing a pilot study to assess milk iron levels from which she will build her dissertation project (see her article on page 6).

Sabrina Perlman, another grad student, just returned from her own dissertation fieldwork studying self-management of diabetes in Ghana. Sabrina investigated how gender and poverty affects diabetes self-management. While poverty and gender roles are known to impact health outcomes, these two have not been examined together in the context of diabetes. While her research primarily applied sociocultural methodology (she conducted interviews and participant observation with patients, doctors, and nurses), her co-chair Dr. Fujita encouraged her to incorporate a biocultural approach. Sabrina collected fasting blood sugar, blood pressure, height and weight data on 60 patients at a hospital diabetes clinic, and will be working with Dr. Fujita to analyze how these health outcomes relate to the qualitative data on the experience of self-managing diabetes in Ghana. For Sabrina, learning to link biological and sociocultural data will help her speak across different disciplines in her work.

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