429 University Museum
Richard A. Axilrod, WG’85, and Nancy M. Axilrod, parents, have made a $2 million gift to establish the Axilrod Term Fund in Health and Inequality. The fund has enabled Penn Arts and Sciences to recruit three new faculty members, Juan Pablo Atal, Courtney Boen, and Morgan Hoke, who will help establish Penn as a worldwide center for the analysis of inequality and health, with a specific focus on the distribution of health outcomes and how this distribution is shaped by social policies. Read more about the fund in the Penn SAS announcement.
Many scholars, like many moms, believe that baby fat exists to keep infants warm. But the conventional wisdom, explained in Sapiens and Slate by Morgan Hoke of the School of Arts and Sciences, is not true. It turns out that the excess fat acts as an energy reserve for the brain, aiding its development while also warding off diseases.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D., Anthropology, Northwestern University, 2017
My research focuses on understanding the interactions between the social and biological forces that produce and reproduce inequalities across generations through mechanisms of developmental plasticity, immune function, human energetics, and nutritional health. I am a biocultural anthropologist with an active field and laboratory research program. My current research is situated in the community of Nuñoa located in the southern Peruvian Andes and employs both ethnographic and biological methodologies to explore the determinants of infant growth and health in a community undergoing rapid economic and nutritional transition.