Sausage of Science
Human Biology Association
The Human Biology Association is a vibrant nonprofit scientific organization dedicated to supporting and disseminating innovative research and teaching on human biological variation in evolutionary, social, historical, and environmental context worldwide.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jun 13, 2023 • 33min
SoS 194: Anwesha Pan joins for the season finale!
Anwesha Pan joins Chris and Mallika to talk about her work on famine and fecundability in Bangladesh as well as the connection between neighborhood-level family poverty and ovarian reserve.
This is the season finale -- please check back in the fall for new content! Thank you to Mallika for filling in as co-host this season!
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Anwesha Pan is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington and can be reached by e-mail at: anweshap@uw.edu
Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair,
Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Sausage of Science Co-Host
Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
E-mail: eric.griffith@duke.edu

May 31, 2023 • 36min
SoS 193: Sofiya Shreyer talks Ukrainian Grandmothers, Aging, and Effective Toggling
Chris welcomes guest co-host, Cristina Gildee, to chat with Sofiya Shreyer, a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Sofiya is passionate about increasing research and education on menopause and other understudied women's health issues, such as PCOS, endometriosis, and sexual wellness. Under the guidance of Dr. Lynnette Sievert, she studies grandmotherhood, variation in caretaking behaviors, and the impact of child-rearing on both grandmaternal and children’s health and well-being. With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Sofiya’s work toggled to focus on the study of menopause, where she manages and coordinates an ongoing multi-year study on hot flash experiences and brown adipose tissue in perimenopausal and menopausal women.
Find her recent book chapter, “Aging and Childcare: A Biocultural Approach to Grandmothering in Ukraine” published in Anthropological Perspectives on Aging here: https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069593
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Sofiya’s email: sshreyer@umass.edu
Twitter: @sofiya_shreyer
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly

May 24, 2023 • 47min
SoS 192: Sean Prall on the Himba, dyadic peer ratings, and the giants of R
Chris and Mallika sit down with Sean Prall, an Assistant Professor and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Missouri. His interests center on human health and reproduction, reproductive decision-making, and evolutionary ecology. He examines costs and trade-offs associated with investments in reproduction. He utilizes a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including anthropometrics, demography, endocrinology, actigraphy, validated health surveys, and dyadic peer ratings, alongside semi-structured demographic interviews and measures of social norms. Sean’s work is informed by a mix of evolutionary and behavioral ecology, cultural evolutionary theory, and evolutionary psychology, especially related to reproductive concerns. Sean is also a co-director of the Kunene Rural Health and Demography Project, a contributor to the ENDOW project, and a collaborator on the Shodagor Longitudinal Health and Demography Project.
Find the publications discussed in today’s episode here: https://sprall.github.io
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Sean’s email: sprall@missouri.edu
Twitter: @ssprall
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu

May 16, 2023 • 49min
SoS 191: Drs. Rosenberg and Trevathan ask listeners for help titling their new book!
Drs. Karen Rosenberg and Wenda Trevathan join the show to discuss their work examining the evolution of human childbirth and infant helplessness. They also preview some of the content that will appear in their forthcoming (untitled) book. Title suggestions are welcome!
Information about their previous publication Costly and Cute can be found here: https://sarweb.org/costly-cute/
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Karen Rosenberg is a biological anthropologist with a specialty in paleoanthropology. She received her degrees from the University of Chicago (B.A. 1976) and the University of Michigan (M.A. 1980, Ph.D., 1986) and has taught at the University of Delaware since 1987. She has studied human fossils and modern human skeletal material in museums in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa. Her research interests are in the origin of modern humans and the evolution of modern human childbirth and human infant helplessness. She has published in edited volumes as well as anthropological and clinical obstetrical journals.
Wenda Trevathan is Regents Professor (emerita) of Anthropology at New Mexico State University and a biological anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on the evolutionary and biocultural factors underlying human reproduction including childbirth, maternal behavior, sexuality, and menopause. Her primary publications include works on the evolution of childbirth and evolutionary medicine. She is a co-editor of two collections of works on evolutionary medicine (Oxford University Press, 1999 and 2008) and published the book Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health (Oxford University Press) in 2010. She currently serves as a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is writing a book on infancy in evolutionary perspective with Karen Rosenberg.
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair,
Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Sausage of Science Co-Host
Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
E-mail: eric.griffith@duke.edu

Apr 11, 2023 • 37min
Sausage of Science 190: Florence Lee and the consequences of pollutant exposure
Chris and Mallika chat with Florence Lee, a PhD candidate at the University of Albany (SUNY), to discuss her collaboration with the Akwasane Task Force on the Environment. Their work investigates pollutant exposure and autoimmunity in Akwesasne Mohawk women. In this episode, Florence discusses the biological consequences of a century of DDT and PCB contamination along the St. Lawrence River for the indigenous women who continue to live there.
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Find the publication discussed in today’s episode here:
“Associations between autoimmune dysfunction and pollutants in Akwesasne Mohawk women: Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and polychlorinated biphenyl exposure” https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23773
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Florence's email: flee2@albany.edu
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu

Mar 28, 2023 • 42min
Sausage of Science 189: Dr. Elizabeth Holdsworth returns!
Elizabeth Holdsworth, PhD, joins the Sausage of Science to chat about her new paper titled “Maternal–infant interaction quality is associated with child NR3C1 CpG site methylation at 7 years of age.”
The paper can be found at the AJHB website here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajhb.23876
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Dr. Elizabeth Holdsworth is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Meehan lab at Washington State University. Elizabeth is a researcher of mother-infant relationships, infant growth, and the early life origins of health. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University at Albany, SUNY, for her biocultural anthropological research into how mothers’ unequal exposure to stress can affect maternal health, as well as contribute to small changes in infant growth through epigenetic mechanisms. Her current research identifies how maternal-infant dynamics and maternal stress may contribute to variation in the milk microbiome.
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair,
Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Sausage of Science Co-Host
Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer
E-mail: eric.griffith@duke.edu

Mar 14, 2023 • 47min
Sausage of Science 188: The BAT suit that thrills and chills, and other tales to make you shiver
Chris and Mallika bring back repeat offender Dr. Stephanie Levy an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, a faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center Department of Anthropology, and a core faculty member of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP). Dr. Levy returns to catch us up on her recent work in human energetics, biological adaptation, circumpolar populations, seasonality, social influences on health disparities, cardiometabolic health, and climate change. She graciously shares her experiences and research as a co-PI on the Indigenous Siberian Health and Adaptation Project (ISHAP), a collaborative project that includes researchers based in Russia and the U.S.
In this episode, we learn about her research exploring how environmental conditions across the life course influence population variation in metabolism and disease risk. Dr. Levy’s work investigates human evolution, adaptation, and health by integrating energetics and endocrinology tools to foster comparative research that examines how ecological and social environments shape biological variation across human populations and primate species.
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Find the publication discussed in today’s episode here:
“Brown adipose tissue thermogenesis among young adults in northeastern Siberia and Midwest United States and its relationship with other biological adaptations to cold climates” https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23723
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Dr. Levy’s email: stephanie.levy@hunter.cuny.edu
Website: https://www.levyhumanbiologylab.com/
Twitter: @slevyscience
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu

Mar 6, 2023 • 45min
Sausage of Science 187: Alicia DeLouize talks minimally invasive biomarkers
Alicia DeLouize, PhD candidate at the University of Oregon, joins Sausage of Science to chat about minimally invasive biomarkers, cancer, and why "Aging is an Earth thing" (maybe).
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Alicia M. DeLouize is a PhD candidate in Biological Anthropology with previous experience in psychology, oncology, and translational research. She specializes in global health, human evolutionary biology, and applied statistics. Her research focuses on the evolutionary and environmental underpinings of physiological systems, including aging, metabolism, the immune system, cancer, and other chronic diseases. By taking a multidisciplinary approach, she uses anthropology, biology, health sciences, psychology, and epidemiology to understand health and disease at the microbiological, personal, and population levels. Currently, she is study coordinator for the the World Health Organization’s World Health Survey Plus (WHS+) and she has worked closely with their Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) where she focuses on the population-based collection and analysis of minimally invasive biomarkers.
You can follow her work at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alicia_Delouize2.
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: eric.griffith@duke.edu

Mar 1, 2023 • 47min
Sausage of Science 186: Dr. Crystal Patil: Doulas, Sunflower Seeds, and Antenatal Needs
Chris and Mallika check in with Dr. Crystal Patil, (Ph.D. Anthropology from Ohio State University) whose research focuses on how the social world becomes embodied and expressed as health, illness, or suffering. The motivation for her research stems from a concern for social justice. Her research draws on ecological and social determinants frameworks to make sense of complex health-related problems. She applies these models as she develops and tests strategies to reduce health disparities and strengthen health systems both in the USA and in sub-Saharan Africa. Her mentoring focuses on fostering the productive careers of students and newer investigators and including them in her active research projects.
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Find the publications discussed in today's episode here:
CenteringPregnancy-Africa: A pilot of group antenatal care to address Millennium Development Goals: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.midw.2013.05.008
Implementation challenges and outcomes of a randomized controlled pilot study of a group prenatal care model in Malawi and Tanzania: https://doi.org/10.1002/ijgo.12324
An effectiveness-implementation hybrid type 1 trial assessing the impact of group versus individual antenatal care on maternal and infant outcomes in Malawi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-8276-x
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Dr. Patil's email: cpatil@uic.edu
Website: https://nursing.uic.edu/profiles/crystal-patil/
Twitter: @clpatil
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu

Feb 21, 2023 • 51min
Sausage of Science 185: Dr. Jason DeCaro: How to Speak Softly and Carry a Big Tool Box
In this episode, Mallika and Chris chat with Dr. Jason DeCaro, Professor and Chair of the University of Alabama's Anthropology Department. Dr. DeCaro studies the intersection of cultural models, everyday practices, and human physiology in the production of differential well-being across the life course, especially but not exclusively focusing on children. His Developmental Ecology and Human Biology Lab is a biological anthropology "wet lab" providing a center within the department for biocultural research involving immunological, endocrine, nutritional, and other biological markers.
His recent publication on applying minimally invasive biomarkers of chronic stress across complex ecological contexts can be found at the following link:
https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23814
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Dr. DeCaro's email: jason.a.decaro@ua.edu
Website: https://dehb.ua.edu/jason-decaro.html
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Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation
Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc
Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly
Mallika Sarma, Website: mallikasarma.com/, Twitter: @skyy_mal
Cristina Gildee, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer:
E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu


