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Bill Derman Enjoys a Productive Retirement
Dr. Bill Derman retired from MSU in 2006, but has hardly slowed down. In fact, since moving to Norway and joining the faculty at the Norwegian University of the Life Sciences (NMBU) in the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), his academic life has flourished. He’s started new collaborative projects and published prolifically thanks to funding from the Research Council of Norway. In 2010 he even “retired” a second time (from NMBU which has a forced retirement age), but continues to teach. His research since he left MSU has taken four tracks: land reform and land restitution in…
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Alumnae Feature: Dr. Sue Schneider
Dr. Sue Schneider’s career as an applied anthropologist has brought her new opportunities to learn and allowed her to impact the lives and well being of the communities in which she has lived and worked. Her interests have always included community health, prevention and health promotion, and her dissertation research at MSU reflected those interests: she examined women’s grassroots health organizing in Mexico, and the strategies of health promoters as they merged different healing traditions within their communities. She published a book on this research, titled “Mexican Community Health and the Politics of Health Reform” (2010). Now, she works as…
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Update from the Graduate Students of Anthropology
The Graduate Students in Anthropology (GSA) is a student-run organization with the goal of fostering community and academic opportunity among graduate students in the department. Caitlin Vogelsberg, GSA treasurer, summarizes the past year’s accomplishments. The GSA has continued to focus on providing academic support for anthropology graduate students. We awarded two more $100 Academic Enhancement Scholarships in the Fall of 2016 and just recently selected the recipients of the Spring 2017 awards. These small but helpful scholarships provide financial support for students for such things as travel funding and academic necessities (i.e., books, equipment, etc.). This January, we held the…
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Featured Graduate Student: Nerli Paredes Ruvalcaba
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…
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Message from the Chair: Dr. Jodie O’Gorman
Welcome to the Spring 2017 newsletter! As usual, there is a lot going on at this time of the year. I am happy to announce that we have hired Dr. Fredy Rodriguez as our new teaching professor. He will be an important link to new undergraduate majors, mentor teaching assistants, and bring a strong interest in cutting-edge pedagogies to our faculty. While serving as the interim undergraduate advisor this past year, Dr. Rodriguez initiated an Anthropology Showcase that will highlight work that undergraduates have produced in different anthropology classes and lab experiences. We will host our first showcase this coming fall,…
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The Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research
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…