AN Bio-Anthro Job Search Presents: Christopher A. Schmitt PhD
The Department of Anthropology
Bio-Anthro Assistant Professor Search
Presents a Lecture by:
Christopher A. Schmitt PhD
Thursday, April 9 4:00 PM
5 Cummington St. BRB 113
“Genomics, Development, and the Evolution of Obesity”
Prolonged growth and development are among the key traits that mark primates, and especially humans, as unique compared to other mammals. Renewed interest in the biomedical and health implications of early environmental impacts on growth and disease throughout the lifespan – especially with respect to obesity – makes for an exciting research area where life history theory, evolution and biomedicine intersect. My research works towards developing a genomic model for the development of obesity-related traits using captive vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus spp), while also establishing a field model to study the evolution of those traits in the wild. My captive work suggests that obesity in vervet monkeys is not only highly heritable and controlled by multiple genes, but that obesity is, in part, due to a heavier growth pattern that is itself moderately heritable. Shifts in diet during ontogeny are observed to not only influence growth postnatally, but also via maternal programming in utero. As part of the International Vervet Research Consortium, I have also collected genomic and phenotypic data on thousands of wild vervet monkeys across their known range. With these samples, collaborators and I have been able to characterize shifts in life history and growth between wild vervet morphotypes, while also uncovering genomic differences between populations that shed light on the developmental biology behind those traits. The combination of pedigree-based analyses in the captive population and the larger-scale variability in the wild provide a powerful and exciting model for us to better understand not only how, but ultimately why individuals grow to become obese.
Christopher A. Schmitt (http://www.evopropinquitous.net) is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar with the Human Evolution Research Center at UC Berkeley and Visiting Assistant Project Scientist at UCLA’s Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics. He also occasionally blogs on Tumblr about horrible field mishaps (http://evopropinquitous.tumblr.com), and even more occasionally tweets (@fuzzyatelin).