Every year, the department puts on the annual Gavan Lecture, bringing in a renowned researcher and honoring Robert Gavan who helped found the department.

Our speaker this semester is Dr. Josh Snodgrass, Professor of Anthropology and Global health at the University of Oregon. The title of his talk is:

Integrating evolutionary and biocultural perspectives to study stress, growth, and health among Shuar forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Ecuador

Over the past half-century, anthropologists have made considerable progress on unraveling the health effects of social and environmental changes among Indigenous groups, documenting shifting patterns of chronic disease and identifying key contributors. However, this research is far from complete. Researchers have recently recognized the need for a more holistic approach to health that moves beyond chronic diseases to also consider infectious/parasitic disease, mental health, and autoimmune conditions; identified differences in health outcomes between populations undergoing social change; struggled to empirically link regional social changes to individual behaviors and health outcomes and to parse the contribution of key factors such as diet, physical activity, and chronic psychosocial stress; and, recognized the need for incorporating and integrating diverse aspects of biology and behavior, including physiological, cultural, cognitive, and genetic/genomic approaches. In this talk, I discuss a long-term interdisciplinary research effort—The Shuar Health and Life History Project—that focuses on Shuar forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Ecuador. After introducing the goals of the project, its theoretical approaches and study methods, and the population, I focus on two research topics as windows onto social and environmental change and health: 1) how the high-pathogen, low-resource environment of lowland Ecuador leads to energetic trade-offs between immune function and growth, and 2) the plasticity of human stress physiology across diverse developmental and socioecological settings.