-
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…
-
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…