SoS 237: Dr. Ian Wallace talks Osteoarthritis and Other Insights from Shiny Bones

Chris and Cristina chat with Dr. Ian Wallace, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, where he is the director of the Human Physical Activity Lab. As an Evolutionary Anthropologist, Ian's work focuses on how humans evolved to use their bodies and explores the costs and benefits of modern physical activity patterns for our health. He is particularly interested in populations transitioning from non-industrial to industrial and post-industrial contexts. Ian earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2013 from Stony Brook University, where his dissertation examined how physical activity and genetics determine limb bone structure. Following graduate school and an initial postdoctoral position at Stony Brook, he completed his postdoctoral training in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and started his own lab at UNM. There, he focuses on measures of locomotor biomechanics and their ties to the health and function of the musculoskeletal system. Recently, his fieldwork has focused on the Indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia. In particular, he is interested in how their lifestyles are changing with the rapid expansion of industries, the market economy, and urban areas across Malaysia, as well as how these changes affect their health and risk of disease. ------------------------------ Find the papers discussed in this episode: Wallace, I. J., Worthington, S., Felson, D. T., Jurmain, R. D., Wren, K. T., Maijanen, H., Woods, R. J., & Lieberman, D. E. (2017). Knee osteoarthritis has doubled in prevalence since the mid-20th century. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(35), 9332–9336. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1703856114 Wallace, I. J., Lea, A. J., Lim, Y. A. L., Chow, S. K. W., Sayed, I. B. M., Ngui, R., Shaffee, M. T. H., Ng, K. S., Nicholas, C., Venkataraman, V. V., & Kraft, T. S. (2022). Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project (OA HeLP): a cross-sectional cohort study protocol. BMJ open, 12(9), e058660. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-058660 ------------------------------ Contact Dr. Wallace: Website: https://www.ianjwallace.com/; E-mail: iwallace@unm.edu ------------------------------ Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association: Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc Chris Lynn, Host Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, E-mail: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly Cristina Gildee, Co-host, SoS Co-Producer, HBA Junior Fellow Website: cristinagildee.org, E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu