Physiological Stress Across the Life Course
Studying how stress, reproduction, and clinical insults shape biological aging and resilience
Background
Much of my work asks how physiological stress is recorded in biological systems and how those signatures relate to aging, resilience, and disease risk. I use the term stress broadly, including reproductive demands, psychosocial adversity, caloric restriction, pregnancy complications, and acute clinical events such as major surgery.
This framework grew out of work on life history theory, developmental origins of health and disease, and social inequality. Earlier projects examined how early life environments and socioeconomic conditions become biologically embedded through DNA methylation and inflammatory pathways. That work continues to shape how I think about stress: not as a single exposure, but as a set of social, energetic, reproductive, and clinical demands that interact with biology across the life course.
Current Work
My current projects apply this framework to several human settings. I study maternal stress and fetal/placental epigenetics, including work on how maternal physiology and social experience may shape placental development. I also work on caloric stress and aging through studies of caloric restriction, where biological aging measures can help evaluate whether interventions alter aging-related molecular processes.
I am also developing work that uses electronic health record laboratory measures to study resilience to cardiothoracic surgery. This project asks whether routine clinical data can be used to measure biological reserve, recovery, and vulnerability around major physiological stress.
Emerging Direction
An important emerging area of my research is the long-term health of women after adverse pregnancy outcomes. I am planning projects focused on how pregnancy complications may forecast later-life health and aging, without treating pregnancy as an isolated clinical event. Instead, I view pregnancy as a biologically informative stress test that may reveal underlying cardiometabolic, inflammatory, and aging-related risk.
Together, these projects extend my earlier work on reproduction and inequality into a broader program on physiological stress, biological aging, and resilience.