Seminar Series

In this talk, Michael Kobor highlights the emerging role of epigenetic modifications at the interface between environments and the genome. Drawing on a large interdisciplinary research network of human population studies with partners from child development, psychology, psychiatry, and epidemiology, Kobor discusses how early life adversities such as poverty and family stress can ”get under the skin” to affect health and behavior across the lifespan.

It is now recognized among many scholars that most socio-behavioral outcomes evince both strong genetic and environmental components that contribute to their variation in natural populations. The next step in reconciling nature and nurture, then, is to properly model gene-environment interplay. Princeton’s Dalton Conley discuss a series of attempts to apply econometric methods for causal inference--namely, a natural experiment framework--to genome-wide data available in social surveys to model gene-by-environment interaction effects. He also reviews alternatives to conceptualizing and measuring genetic regulation of plasticity that may inform GxE models.

For children, parental separation is often accompanied by an increased risk of poverty and deteriorating living standards. These effects have been studied over relatively short periods of time, and not considering the multi-faceted context of childhood disadvantage. Lidia Panico discusses how she used the UK Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative cohort of over 18,000 children, to consider how parental separation affects the experience of childhood poverty and multi-domain deprivation from birth to age 11.

Understanding demographic responses to climate-related natural disasters has garnered sustained attention ever since the 2007 IPCC report. There is the challenge of accounting for the entire complexity of human behavioral and institutional responses. The University of Washington’s Sara Curran discusses how her recent study produced models that can be used to address some of the challenges facing policy makers and researchers seeking to understand the complexities of human responses to climate change.

Robert Pollak discusses the substantial effects of fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) on children's long-term educational outcomes. He posits that analysis suggests that the effects of fathers' MPF are primarily due to selection rather than resources. He also discusses how his results show that fathers’ MPF warrants far more attention than it has thus far received.

Research on the environmental dimensions of migration has burgeoned over the past several years. Prof. Hunter provides an overview of this work, with specific examples from her own collaborative scholarship on migration within, and from, Mexico. She will also offer a brief glimpse into her research on natural resource availability and livelihood migration from the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in rural South Africa. In this presentation, she’ll also highlight the challenges facing migration-environment scholars and pathways forward.

Social status is one of the strongest predictors of disease risk and mortality in humans, and may influence Darwinian fitness in social mammals more generally. Duke's Noah Snyder-Mackler discusses how his study combined genomics with a social status manipulation in female rhesus macaques to investigate how status alters immune function. He also reviews how his findings provide insight into the direct biological effects of social inequality on immune function, thus contributing to an improved understanding of social gradients in health and the evolution of social hierarchies.

UCLA's Steve Horvath discusses epigenetic biomarkers of aging (the “epigenetic clock”), and examines their potential in addressing puzzling findings surrounding mortality rates and incidence of cardio-metabolic disease such as: (1) women consistently exhibiting lower mortality than men despite having higher levels of morbidity; (2) racial/ethnic groups having different mortality rates even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences; (3) the black/white mortality cross-over effect in late adulthood; and (4) Hispanics in the United States having a longer life expectancy than Caucasians despite having a higher burden of traditional cardio-metabolic risk factors.

In the past few years, the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) has been conducting large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analyses of behavioral phenotypes, including educational attainment, subjective well-being (i.e., happiness), and fertility. Dan Benjamin reviews the results of these studies and also provides some background on the SSGAC and discusses ongoing work-in-progress.