Much of my current research activity is focused in urban South Phoenix, comprised of predominantly migrant, lower-income, and Latino/a neighborhoods near downtown. I am working with community partners and an interdisciplinary team of researchers (including Chris Boone, Amber Wutich, and Seline Szkupinski Quiroga) to better understand how cultural norms and social networks interact to shape disease risk at the household and neighborhood level in such resource-short urban settings, and how they can in turn be leveraged to shape more healthful and just local policy and practices for those communities. For example, it has for some time been noted ‘less acculturated’ (i.e., more ‘Mexican’) Mexican-Americans are much healthier than would be predicted based on educational and income variables, but we need much better ways to approach ‘culture’ (such as offered by social network analysis) to understand exactly how and why ‘Mexican culture’ might provide buffering from some of the negative health effects of urban poverty. I am particularly interested in how the degree of difference between children and their parents (who can be operating in very similar or distinct social arenas) conflates these relationships. This is because I am very interested in questions of how a more child-centered approach, one based in children's own worlds and words, can innovate our understanding of health variation, moving beyond children being treated merely as an extension of their parents’ or household situation.

Other current projects include (at various levels of progress) a study looking at how women's relatively low social status in the Muslim state of Uzbekistan is linked to their psycho-bio-social stress (including risk of depression), and how pharmacists’ and clients’ differing cultural models might explain the scale of non-prescription antibiotic purchasing on the Mexican-US border - a contributing factor to growth of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. I am also engaged in a global-level analysis of child obesity risk to understand how it is related to changing economic factors at the household level.

There are a number of basic questions that drive and link my current research projects. These include:

How can children's own engagement with and views of the world impact their health?
Together with a number of my graduate students, I am exploring how children's own world views and forms of social engagement can both positively and negatively impact their health. In some contexts, especially poverty conditions in developing countries, children’s own activities, even at young ages, can be beneficial. Research with Sarah Lee based on observational and nutritional study with shantytown children in Mexico indicates that children’s cash work can have significant positive effects on their siblings’ wellbeing, even if it is neutral for the children themselves. My recent research in rural Georgia with Meredith Gartin suggested a very clear example of negative impacts: young children (even by 3 years) can very effectively out-maneuver their parents' attempts to improve their dietary quality, and have significant control over what they eat (and this is despite parent's cultural models and strategies that would predict children would eat better) in ways that elevates their risk of obesity dramatically.

How do populations cope with the particular stressors of globalizing and urbanizing environments?
The majority of people in the world now live in urban or rapidly urbanizing environments, and these raise new issues of how we can understand culture-health interactions under rapidly changing political, economic, and ecological conditions. In the South Phoenix project, we are thinking about the ways in which people configure household and social arrangements to help them adapt to the stressful aspects of urban poverty, such as increasing their food security or access to health care. In previous projects I have explored one particular globalizing environment of childhood, where most children in the world now spend a fair chunk of their time: formal schooling. This included a cross-cultural study of the relationship between normal patterns of child behavior and the identification of behavior problems (such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD]). What I enjoyed most about this project was the challenge of figuring out how bio-cultural anthropologists can better incorporate social aspects of everyday ecologies and the psychological status of individuals into the study of human adaptation. Classrooms and peer groups of childhood can be two potentially very challenging and stressful social environments in which children must operate, and I found understanding that adaptive process in children's own terms to be another particularly compelling aspect of this research.

How are social inequalities translated into our biology and hence underpin health disparities?
The health disparities we observe within populations (including in the U.S.) at present are massive, and only increasing. These disparities are not adequately or even well explained by strict genetic and biological factors. It is ultimately broader social and cultural processes that create inequities that lead to disparities: I am interested in the part of the causal chain where such broader social forces become manifest in people's everyday health—that is, actually linking the relative status of individuals and populations to their health or nutrition status. Mostly, I am focused on the impacts of economic and gender inequities, such as the lower social status of women. A good example of this is a current study of interview and biomarker data from Uzbekistan, a former Soviet and now Muslim state where women's social and economic status has seen significant change since independence. I have been working on questions of how women's relative economic and social autonomy affect their psychological and physical well-being, and also that of their children.