Seminar Series

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.

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.

Race/Ethnicity and Health in the Trump Era: Evidence-Based Projections and Speculations

 

Smoking and obesity are the top-two leading causes of preventable disease and death in the US and significant sources of the substantial disparities in health between socioeconomic status (SES) groups. Pietro Biroli discusses his recent study that constructed poligenic risk scores (PGS) to evaluate whether these genetic variants mediate the effects of childhood SES in determining adult risky health behaviors. He also reviews the empirical results of the study through the lenses of a canonical economic model of health formation and addiction, extended to include genetic heterogeneity.

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.

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.

David Ribar discusses how children’s intellectual and behavioural outcomes differ conditional on whether their biological parents dissolved their relationships in high- and low-conflict circumstances. He explores how he utilized data from the 1st through 5th waves of the birth and kindergarten cohorts of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to study parental dissolution and conflict are associated with worse outcomes for Australian children, especially among the younger children in the LSAC birth cohort.

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.

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.

Research computing has changed dramatically in the last few years, and those changes are reshaping how Duke provides research computing support to Duke researchers. The scope and characteristics of computing for research has long come in "large packages" that have unyielding rules and restrictions -- to which researchers conformed their research projects. Increasingly, the emphasis has shifted, so that researchers now have the opportunity to tailor computing resources to fit their particular needs. Duke's Mark DeLong explores this transformation in research computing and presents offerings that Duke Research Computing has developed.