Gioia received Honorable Mention on her National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program application this year. She also received the Harriet J. Kupferer Graduate Exploratory Summer Research Award to fund her pilot research project in Ecuador this summer. Congrats, Gioia!

This semester, Isa defended her master’s thesis entitled, “Migration and health outcomes in Purepecha sending communities.” This work is based on Isa’s research in the summer of 2015.

Hannah also defended her master’s thesis entitled, “Social and economic change and rising rate of cesarean section in Ecuador,” for which she analyzed data from Ecuador’s 2012 nationally-representative dataset Encuesta Nacional de Salud y Nutrición (ENSANUT-ECU).

Dr. Crystal Patil will be giving a talk on Monday, November 9th  at 3:35 in Alumni Hall Room 207. Join us!

This fall we welcomed two new PhD students, Gioia Skeltis and Kari Riggle.

Katie Barrett received a pilot grant from the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences to study the metabolic hormones leptin, ghrelin, and adiponectin in African American infants in North Carolina. She will be looking at how these hormones vary among infants before and after the introduction of solid foods, and if they vary by maternal weight status.