Education
- PhD in Anthropology at Emory University (2001)
- MSPH in Epidemiology at Emory University (2001)
- BA in Anthropology at University of Colorado Boulder (1993)
Position
- Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University
- Fellow at Institute for Policy Research
Publications
- PhD Thesis: Maternal Nutrition, Fetal Growth, and Cardiovascular Risk in Filipino Adolescents advised by Dr. Lampl
- Publications — There is a long, long list of publications on his website
Biography
Dr. Chris Kuzawa is a biological anthropologist studying human growth, reproduction, and health using principles from evolutionary life history, behavioral ecology, and epidemiology During his time at Emory, he wrote his dissertation on using multiple measures of nutritional status, diet, and fetal growth in a cohort of Filipino adolescents in Cebu, Philippine. His work from this study demonstrate how early life environments influence growth, adult health, endocrinology, immunity, and reproduction. In particular, this study provided strong evidence that prenatal undernutrition heightens risk for diseases of overnutrition later in life. Expanding from his dissertation, he has also studied fatherhood at Cebu and how reproductive hormone levels change with the transition to marriage and fatherhood, supporting the hypothesis that male caregiving is a strategy with deep evolutionary roots in the human lineage.
After receiving his PhD in anthropology and MSPH in epidemiology from Emory University, Dr. Kuzawa conducted post-doctoral research in in cardiovascular epidemiology at University of Minnesota. Following this research, he joined the faculty of anthropology at Northwestern University in 2003. He is also the Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research and co-directs the Health Inequality Network of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group at Northwestern University to understand how social inequality affects biology. He is also an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Kuzawa’s broad research goals are to understand the origins of human biological variation and health and the evolution of unique features of the human life cycle. He is known in particular for his work on using empirical and theoretical approaches to understand the role of ‘developmental plasticity,’ or the sensitivity of the developing to to the environment in early stages of development, as an influence on adult health. For example, some of his research examines how what a mother eats during pregnancy, her access to adequate prenatal care, or her stress levels, could permanently impact the fetus that leads to greater risk of some of the most common causes of adult morbidity and mortality, such as hypertension and diabetes.
His other research projects focus on the psychobiology of social relationships and fatherhood, genetics and molecular biology, the evolution of the human brain and evolutionary medicine. One of his recent inquiries involve examining the energetic costs and evolution of human brain development that helps to explain why humans grow more slowly than other mammals during childhood.