SoS 232: Marina Watowich on the link between environmental changes, aging, and your health

Cristina guest hosts her first episode with special guest Dr. Marina Watowich: an Evolutionary Biologist and current NIH F32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Watowich earned her Ph.D. in Biology in 2022 from the University of Washington, where she specialized in Data Science. Her research focuses on how environmental perturbations impact long-term health-related phenotypes and why some individuals are more resilient/susceptible to adverse conditions. To do this, she uses a combination of genomic approaches, computational techniques, and long-term observational data to understand how the environment 'gets under the skin' to result in phenotypic variation. Marina was recently awarded an F32 grant from the National Institutes of Aging to explore the consequences of differential immune investment on molecular aging phenotypes in subsistence-level populations. ------------------------------ Find the papers discussed in this episode: Watowich, Marina M., et al. "Natural disaster and immunological aging in a nonhuman primate." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119.8 (2022): e2121663119. Watowich, M. M., Arner, A. M., Wang, S., John, E., Kahumbu, J. C., Kinyua, P., ... & Lea, A. J. (2024). The built environment is more predictive of cardiometabolic health than other aspects of lifestyle in two rapidly transitioning Indigenous populations. medRxiv. ------------------------------ Contact Marina: website: https://mwatowich.github.io/; email: marina.watowich@vanderbilt.edu ------------------------------ Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association: Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc Cristina Gildee, Host, SoS Co-Producer, HBA Junior Fellow Website: cristinagildee.org, E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu