Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social and environmental influences on inflammation

This doctoral dissertation research project investigates how social and environmental factors that create stress ‘get under the skin’ through the process of inflammation, to influence biological outcomes that impact well-being over the life course. Chronic inflammation can be a cause or sign of disease, and inflammatory responses are precursors of poor health outcomes and offer insights into understanding disease onset. This project contributes to a clearer understanding of the ways in which social and environmental factors serve as mechanisms that induce inflammation, linking stress to disease. By focusing analysis on variation in the biomarker C-reactive protein (CRP), a well validated biomarker of inflammation, in relationship to variation in indices of environmental and psychosocial stress, the results of this study can contribute to better identifying the underpinnings of the links between stress, inflammation, environmental drivers, and biological outcomes. This is a community-centered project which provides research training to participants and sets the foundation for future research in this emerging area. Epigenetic pathways act as channels between social factors and disease risk throughout life, and epigenetic modifications can impact inflammatory responses. In clinically oriented research, variation in outcomes related to human health is often grouped into census-level categories that may not be informative with respect to understanding human biological variation. Incorporating environmental information and evidence of potentially linked epigenetic modifications can offer a more nuanced understanding of variation across the full pathway of causation, from mechanism to outcome. This project aims to 1) understand how variation in social and other environmental factors relates to variation in CRP concentrations, both within and across populations, and 2) to understand how social and environmental factors influence methylation in areas of the genome related to stress physiology and stress response. Taken together, results generated from this project can advance understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in the transduction of environmental and lived experience to biological outcomes and inform theoretical frameworks regarding the evolution and trade-offs involved in these mechanisms within and across human populations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.