Meet the scientists!

I study women’s reproductive health, so mostly I study the ovaries and uterus. I am interested in how our lifestyles and environment impact reproductive health. I also look at how our behavior and reproductive health impact each other, especially around hormones. I think the hormone levels of young adults are understudied and would like to see more people look at that. For more on my take on why science is so important, read this blog post, or check out my whole blog, Context and Variation. Lots of fun stuff, and not just for girls – I cover evolutionary psychology quite a bit.

Because I am an anthropologist, I am interested in how reproduction and hormones vary based on what population you are in. So I do my fieldwork in rural, southern Poland. Here’s a picture of the Polish countryside where I work:

There, people live a very traditional, agricultural lifestyle and still get most of their food from their own fields and gardens. They work very hard in the summers which brings down their hormone levels, but also decreases their cancer risk. By working in a more traditional environment, I can compare my results to studies of humans in urban environments, like London or Chicago.

Here are a few other images from the field, so you can see scientists in action! The first is me and my field assistant traveling to the home of a subject to collect samples (yes, we walked everywhere and yes, we often had to go over bridges, past attack dogs and attack turkeys, and through fields that made me sneeze). The second picture is the whole field team after climbing Mogielica Mountain, the nearby mountain where all the locals go to pick blueberries and have festivals.

Also, you may be wondering what I mean by “samples.” In addition to doing ultrasounds to look at the uterus, I ask women to spit and pee for me — really! And as you can see from the pic below, they are happy to oblige:

Now, you got the one sentence description of my life as an anthropologist. But what you also need to know is that I have an alter-ego… the Anthrobrawlogist! I play roller derby, which is a full contact women’s sport on roller skates. So after I put in a full morning and afternoon working on issues in women’s health, feed my daughter dinner, play with her, and put her to bed, I put on my roller skates and skate around with a group of very cool women late into the night. The picture you see here is with my daughter at one of our Saturday practices. I think it’s fun to be a very physically active person, since a large part of my research focuses on the impact of physical activity on hormones and health.

What better way to do my science than by giving people a chance to share their stories of how their bodies work and how they vary? One of the coolest things about the human body is that it is responsive to our environment — where we grew up, how much food we eat, how much we move around, even whether we are an older or younger sister or brother! So our shape, size, hormone levels, everything varies because of it. Yet we all seem to think that we need to fit into some narrow interpretation of normal to be okay. I’d like to give young people a chance to share a bit about their lives and how they vary. Maybe then we can learn about how normal it really is to be different.