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.

Isa Godinez was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support her doctoral training and research on metabolic risk and nutrition transition in Mexico. Brittany Chamberlain was awarded the UNC Graduate School’s Summer Research Fellowship and Off Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship for her fieldwork on infant feeding knowledge and behaviors among African American Mothers. We are so proud of you both!

Brittany just presented a poster at the Annual Meeting for the Human Biology Association on her Master’s Thesis and continued research entitled “Understanding differences between infant feeding knowledge and behaviors among low-income African American mothers.” Her research examined qualitative and quantitative data from the Infant Care and Risk of Obesity, looking at the associations among sources of knowledge, feeding beliefs, and feeding behaviors.

Achsah, Hannah, and Isa were awarded new Predoctoral Traineeships at the Carolina Population Center at UNC for 2015-2016. The CPC trainee program brings together exceptional students and faculty from across campus focusing on population-related research. Students from the Human Biology Lab have received methodological and demographic training at CPC since 2008.

We congratulate Achsah Dorsey for receiving two Outstanding Research for A Master’s Award from the University of Alabama and their Arts and Sciences Program. Her MA thesis is entitled Selected Successors: An Investigation of Sex-Differentiated Parental Care and Child Health Outcomes in Northwest Tanzania.

We would like to wish Hannah luck as she has been awarded the Tinker Field Research Grant from the Institute for the Study of the Americas to conduct pre-dissertation exploratory work in Cuba this summer. This work will be foundational for a long-term project that will research how Cuba’s maternity homes may shape Cuba’s impressive infant health.