Doctoral Dissertation Research: Impacts of early life adversity on bone growth and maintenance

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Adversity in early life has wide-ranging effects on individual growth and development. Research has documented important deficits in growth, especially in the limbs. Yet, changes induced by early life adversity are almost certainly expressed in other aspects of skeletal morphology.

This doctoral dissertation research project uses life history theory to investigate how energetic trade-offs impact bone growth as well as bone structure and dynamic remodeling to develop a more complete understanding of the effects of early life condition on growth and development outcomes. These insights also shed light on more general drivers of individual variation and the evolutionary and biological mechanisms that enable such variation.

The project supports the training and mentorship of diverse undergraduate and graduate students. Results will be shared via publications, outreach, and educational efforts to ensure broad dissemination.

The research project investigates these issues in primates with well documented variation in growth and development outcomes and in socio-ecological environments during development. The investigators test the hypothesis that individuals born into high quality early life conditions (moderate rainfall, mothers of high dominance rank) will have improved markers of growth and structural and material properties of bone.

The investigators test the additional hypothesis that the magnitude of impacts will be stronger in comparison to individuals with multiple sources of early life adversity. The investigators test the hypotheses via analysis of long bone lengths, cross-sectional geometric properties of bone, bone porosity, and parameters of bone remodeling. The study is novel in its integration of standard whole bone measurements with investigations of bone’s internal microscopic structural properties.

Findings leverage bone’s ability to act as a window into an individual’s developmental past, providing insight into how the skeleton responds to environments throughout life and more general insights into the primate evolutionary biology.

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.