Research
Overview
Climate change poses one of the greatest existential threats to human lifeways and human health. Globally, women and children are among the groups most-impacted - especially those living in minoritized and economically- and medically-underserved communities. However, the innovations, adaptations, and community-building of women across the globe may hold some of the best solutions to these problems. My research uses evolutionary theory to examine the complex relationships between environmental change (including climate events and environmental seasonality), women’s livelihoods, and maternal and child health and nutritional outcomes in order to identify potential mechanisms driving sub-optimal outcomes as areas for public health or public policy intervention. This work addresses the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals associated with gender equality, decent work and economic growth, and climate action. I established and direct the Shodagor Longitudinal Health and Demography Project, which collects longitudinal and cross-sectional data in cooperation with Shodagor fisher-traders in rural Bangladesh and uses a between- and within-subjects study design to study these relationships in detail.
research areas
climate change & environmental seasonality
Around the world and throughout human evolutionary history, environmental change has been one of the primary factors driving human behavior and biology. These changes may be predictable, like seasonality, or unpredictable, like major climate events, such as flooding, draught, and extreme temperatures. Anthropogenic climate change is impacting both of these, resulting in seasonal weather patterns that are less predictable, and extreme weather events that are more common.
My research with the Bangladeshi Shodagor communities highlights ways that both seasonality and extreme climate events affect subsistence patterns and health and nutritional outcomes in a non-industrialized, low-income, and medically-underserved context. Current work is also using multiple sources of longitudinal climate data (temperature, rainfall, flooding inundation data) to examine how changes to seasonality have altered Shodagor women’s livelihood practices and subsequent infant and young child feeding, growth, and nutritional outcomes.
Women’s livelihoods and childcare
Across cultures, women’s economic contributions to their households are critical to the survival, health, and well-being of all household members, but particularly women and children. Women are also responsible for the majority of childcare in nearly all human contexts. My research shows that women adapt to local, environmental conditions by trading-off time spent in economic production and childcare and strategically developing their social networks in ways that have clear impacts on child nutrition, growth, and illness. This work indicates that policies and interventions that support flexibility in women’s working hours and conditions, as well as those that prioritize high-quality childcare substitutes for maternal care are key to supporting women’s livelihoods as well as child health and nutrition.
Climate change is leading to women working longer hours and traveling farther from home to acquire necessary resources for their households (e.g., food, water, firewood, etc.). My work on women’s livelihoods and its effects on child outcomes informs a developing stream of research, which aims to determine how climate change-induced changes to women’s work are leading to more exposure to harmful weather conditions, like extreme heat, and how this is affecting women’s health, as well as infant and young child feeding and child nutrition and growth.
maternal and child health and nutrition
Women and children living in low-income, minoritized, and medically-underserved contexts, like those often found in the Global South, are among the populations most impacted by the effects of climate change. Among Shodagor communities in Bangladesh, I examine how interactions between environmental change, including seasonality and extreme climate events, and women’s livelihood strategies affect maternal and child nutrition and growth.
In order to assess these relationships, my research team and I use 7+ years of longitudinal anthropometric data, biomarkers of general and specific infection, and bi-weekly reports of illness symptoms, as well as self-report nutritional measures, including breastfeeding frequency, age at complementary feeding and weaning, food frequencies, and household food expenditures.
Specifically, we have modeled the relationships between seasonality, women’s work and childcare, and child growth and illness, the pathway through which extreme flooding affected household nutrition and changes to children’s and adults’ BMI, and the impacts of extreme heat on maternal/infant breastfeeding activity. Current and future work continues to examine these relationships, with an emphasis on infant and young child feeding practices and child growth outcomes, as well as maternal energetic condition and other health outcomes.
