Alma Solis, Ph.D., will graduate with a degree in evolutionary anthropology and a Global Health Graduate Certificate from the Duke Global Health Institute. In her youth, Solis migrated between California, Arizona and Mexico as her father worked in agriculture. This experience molded Solis’ research interest on addressing health disparities among farmers, investigating communicable and non-communicable disease susceptibility. Her research received funding from DGHI’s Doctoral Scholars program.
At Duke, I studied … the variation in social environment to understand communicable and non-communicable disease susceptibility. I did this within the “One Health Disparities” framework that looks at the interconnectedness of human health, environmental health and animal health in a small-scale agriculturalist society in Madagascar. I studied Blastocystis and its prevalence to better understand if variation in wealth, animal contact, or handwashing practices decreased the odds of infection. In addition, I studied sleep as an important dimension of hypertension risk and immune dysregulation.
I enrolled in the graduate certificate program because … I wanted to pair my evolutionary anthropology training with global health perspectives. I also wanted the opportunity to meet with other students and professors with an interdisciplinary mindset to see how different disciplines can be applied to address global health challenges.
Studying global health helped me ... understand there isn’t one way of seeing and doing research; global health can be addressed in multiple ways. It taught me the importance of collaboration, which is a key part of community involvement. For my research, I leaned on a team of scientists from the Association of Vahatra and community members in Madagascar.
My plan after graduating is … I’m excited to join the Tsimané Health and Life History Project (THLHP), a joint health and anthropology project at the University of California-Santa Barbara, as a postdoctoral research associate. During this time, I’ll focus on advancing my research interest in sleep and health as both play a central role in promoting heart health and brain health. To date, there is limited research on the association between Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) risk and sleep, and that research is even more limited at a global scale.
At Tsimané, I will examine the role sleep has on immune dysregulation, heart health and risk of ADRD among the Tsimané, an Indigenous population in lowland Bolivia. They’re known for their high levels of physical activity and pathogen exposure yet low rates of ADRD and cardiovascular disease. This opportunity will allow me to utilize some of the most robust sleep data, address critical questions that emerged from my dissertation research and gain valuable mentorship to prepare me for future research endeavors.
My advice to students seeking a global health experience … is to just go for it. There is space for everyone in global health, especially people from the global majority. Don’t feel limited by not having a formal education in global health or coming from a social science background. It’s important to integrate lived experiences and diverse research disciplines in global health, and I hope to continue to do that in the future.
