[MUSIC] This is Day in the Life, part of a series of video showcasing the amazing diversity of health-related jobs. In these interviews, we'll hear a little bit about what a day in the life of a health professional may look like. Social science careers have direct impact on health. And as you will see in this video, when combined with laboratory science, can create powerful impact on the health of populations. [MUSIC] >> Hi, I'm Thom McDade. I'm a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. I'm a director of the Laboratory for Human Biology Research, where we do research into health, social and environmental factors affect human biology and health over life course. Biological anthropology is interested in human bio, biological variation, where we came from and what we, what are species is like compared to other species and how our biologies function. The lab here is called the Laboratory of Human Biology Research and it's fundamentally dedicated to the development and application of methods that allow us to study human biology and health in diverse community based settings all around the world. Stress matters to health and we've known that stress matters to health for a long time. But we, what we haven't known and what's taken a lot of work to figure out is how it matters to health. Most research on stress has asked people about sources of stress in their lives and then has also asked them to report on levels of health, symptoms of disease, lifestyle behaviors things like that. And that work has been very important for demonstrating the effects of stress on health. But it can't get us under the skin. In order to get under the skin, you have to collect blood or saliva or other biological substances that allow us to measure bio markers of immune function that may be related to stress. So that requires us to innovate in terms of methods for sample collection. Because we don't have access to a complete laboratory infrastructure in the places we do our research, we don't have a centrifuge, we don't have freezers and refrigerators. What people may not want people approaching them with big needles and jabbing them in their arm. Many places we work, we don't even have electricity. And for the past 15 years, we've turned to Guthrie cards or filter papers that cost only a dollar or two, so very low cost. We take the cards into the field and we use lancets, that are commonly used by diabetics to monitor their blood sugar in the United States. We nick the finger, get a few drops of blood apply them to the paper. The paper draws the blood off the finger and then it dries. And the process of drying the blood on the paper preserves it. We can stack the card, the cards set them aside in a plastic bag and then ship them back to the lab. And we take a hole punch, and we punch out discs of blood. Put them in a test tube with some buffer, reconstitute the blood over night where we basically have made blood again. And then, we pull out samples of blood and put them into our amino acid platform and analyze them much as we would a venus blood sample. The work that that we do in the lab is global. We work in various populations all around the world, including the United States. In the Philippines, we're working on a project looking at how environments early in life, in infancy, affect biology and health later in life, in adulthood. In Bolivia and Ecuador, we have projects looking at how market integration and culture change affects health. In Samoa, we were looking at how this high level of stress associated with globalization, rapid culture change was affecting the immune systems and health of adolescence. In high school, I had no idea what anthropology is, was, I, it was not offered in my high school, I didn't even know that it existed as a discipline. But in college I almost by chance started to take some anthropology classes. And it, it introduced me to a different way of thinking about health and human growth and development. And I thought it was fascinating. >> [MUSIC]