PEOPLE
Tiffany Pan
Postdoctoral Fellow
Tiffany Pan is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Anthropology at UCSB. She earned a PhD in Bio-cultural Anthropology and an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Washington. Her research interests are broadly in evolutionary tradeoffs of reproduction and immune function and their implications for health and fertility in contemporary human populations. She is currently collaborating with Cottage Health Research Institute in Santa Barbara on a project to better understand changes in immune function during pregnancy with a focus on the dynamics of microchimerism (cells that travel bidirectionally during pregnancy and can persist long-term in a genetically distinct individual).
Carmen Hové
Graduate Student
Carmen Hové studies human physiology from an evolutionary perspective, with special emphasis on topics relevant to medicine.
Maya Szafraniec
Graduate Student
Maya studies fetal-maternal conflict through the lens of comparative life history, ecology, and evolutionary theory. She uses computational biology and genomics to examine the consequences of these trade offs on proximal impacts to health and disease, as well as on larger evolutionary questions. Areas where these conflicts may occur include fetal microchimerism and placenta biology.
Mary Boyd
ACE Undergraduate Researcher
Olivia Mendoza
ACE Undergraduate Researcher
Olivia is passionate about cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology, and medical disease research, and she hopes to incorporate computer programming into her future research. She is also heavily involved in the performing arts, specifically music, and is interested in combining research and music in the future. She expects to graduate in June 2022.
Amy Lam
Undergraduate Researcher
Emilie Risha
Undergraduate Researcher
Emilie Risha is an undergraduate biological anthropology student at UCSB, assisting in research on fetal and maternal microchimerism. She enjoys learning about pregnancy, human biology and evolution, and how ancestrally-derived structures operate in modern contexts. In the future, she hopes to work directly with birthing people and their families as a doula or midwife, to support the individuals’ full well-being and autonomy in birth and in life.
Amy Boddy
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Wayne State University – School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan.
ALUMNI
Kenna Sherman
Undergraduate Researcher
Kenna is passionate about behavioral neuroscience and genetics. Specifically, she is interested in mental illness and using genomics to find cures for complex diseases such as cancer. She expects to graduate in June 2021.
Sydney Collier
Undergraduate Researcher
Sydney is interested in evolution and genetics. Sh is specifically interested in how we can use genetics and evolutionary theory to find cures for medical diseases. She expects to graduate in 2020.
@ amy_boddy
