News

New news from The Young Research Group will be shared on Dr. Sera Young’s LinkedIn.


Past news

  • Dr. Godfred Boateng and Shalean Collins receive USDA ThinkWater Fellowship

    Congratulations to Dr. Godfred Boateng and Shalean Collins who have been accepted as USDA ThinkWater Fellows for 2016-2017. This fellowship builds on the theories of systems-thinking to enhance research in water-related fields by incorporating interdisciplinary communication, individually tailored consultation, public presentation, and peer-reviewed publication. Godfred and Shalean will spend the next 8 months developing skills…

    Read more

  • Dr. Elizabeth Fox wins student poster competition at the Society for Applied Anthropology!

    Congratulations to Dr. Elizabeth Fox for winning 1st place in the student poster competition at the Society for Applied Anthropology’s 2016 Annual Meeting in Vancouver. The poster highlighted a part of Elizabeth’s dissertation in which she used free listing to illuminate the array of messages HIV-infected mothers received in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and in which she explored the…

    Read more

  • Iron-Folic Acid and Calcium Supplementation in Pregnancy

    Our paper, led by Stephanie Martin, on the use of formative research to develop behavior change strategies to promote iron-folic acid and calcium supplementation in pregnancy is now available in Maternal and Child Nutrition! In brief, we conducted in-depth interviews with pregnant and postpartum women and health workers in western Kenya to identify barriers and…

    Read more

  • Low B-12 concentrations in Kenyan women’s breastmilk

    Congratulations to Dr. Anne Williams and co-authors! Our manuscript “Breastmilk vitamin B-12 concentrations are low and are not associated with reported household hunger, recent animal source food or vitamin B-12 intake among women in rural Kenya” has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Nutrition. We found lower than average dietary B-12 intake and breastmilk B-12…

    Read more

  • NIH digs our water insecurity ideas!

    In the course of our formative work in Kenya on food insecurity (cf. Pith Moromo, below), we discovered that household level water insecurity seems to be an unappreciated source of adverse physical and mental health. As such, it brought me great pleasure that the Young Group received the official notice of award today for our R21 application entitled “Health Consequences…

    Read more

  • Representing at EB 2016

    The Young Group will be bringing it hard at Experimental Biology 2016, the premier nutritional science research venue. With 6 oral presentations and 8 posters, the team is gearing up for a robust and productive conference session. We are especially proud that two of our oral presentations have undergraduate group members as first authors. Nice Formation!

    Read more

  • SNAP Baseline survey launches

    Thanks to this expert team of enumerators and anthropometry gurus, the baseline survey for the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology Project has begun! Rachel Bezner Kerr, Vicky Santoso and I had a lot of fun pitching in with the participant selection and training. We give an especially big thanks to the leadership at Action Aid Tanzania and Nelson…

    Read more

  • Our AJCN paper turns 100!

    According to Google Scholar, our paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, in which we outline the pathways by which food insecurity can be deleterious in the context of HIV, has reached 100 citations. This paper provided important theoretical framing for our approach to understanding the consequences of food insecurity among mothers and children in Uganda, Tanzania, and…

    Read more

  • Vicky becomes a Borlaug Fellow in Global Food Security!

    Hip Hip Hurray for Vicky Santoso (on the right, with Hijab Khan), who won a well-deserved Borlaug Fellowship for Global Food Security. This prestigious fellowship will support her work on women’s empowerment in agriculture within the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology Project that will be launching later this month. Bravo!

    Read more

  • Geophagy in Uganda

    Dr. Paula Pebsworth, our star primatologist post-doc, is busy setting up more camera traps (one pictured, bottom right) in Budongo Forest, Uganda. As it turns out, the chimpanzees there are wild about eating earth (as are many other species), and Paula is working hard to assess just what it is, exactly, that drives this behavior. We are fortunate to be…

    Read more

  • Thrasher Fund Award for Beth!

    Congratulations to Dr. Beth Widen on her Thrasher Research Fund Early Career Award! Beth’s award will fund her post-doctoral research in low-income dyads in New York City that focuses on the complex pathways between maternal nutrition, environmental toxicant exposure, the home environment and child neurodevelopment.

    Read more

  • Our paper on complementary feeding among HIV-infected Tanzanian women is out!

    Congrats to Anne Williams, for her very hard work in getting this paper published in the Journal of Human Lactation! While breastfeeding practices have been fairly well-characterized among PLHIV, complementary feeding practices have been almost completely overlooked. Therefore, our work among women in the Pwani region of Tanzania is a useful contribution. Our data suggest that EBF is an…

    Read more