Heather Edgar (University of New Mexico) - "Disruptive Anthropology? Biocultural Approaches to Inequity"

Wednesday, January 18, 2023 - 12:00pm

Museum Room 345

An explicitly bicultural approach "views culture and biology as inextricably intertwined, emphasizing dynamic interaction between humans and their larger, social, cultural, and physical environments (Zuckerman and Martin, 2016)." Here, Dr. Edgar discusses research that brings a biocultural focus to human population structure and well-being. The goal of this work it to understand how historic and contemporary inequity shapes the biology of populations, especially in the United States and Mexico. In addition, Dr. Edgar will describe work that relates to alleviating inequity in access to methods and materials for scientific research. This work focuses on simplifying methods so they can be more widely applied and providing access to large data resources so that more people can participate in the scientific endeavor. The goal of this radical sharing is to disrupt who can do science through the application of informatics and technology to tear down traditional barriers on a global scale.