Our lab has had fantastic year. Check out our new papers and projects!

The Evolutionary Immunology and Genomics lab is part of the new NIOSH/CDC funded Center for Farmworker Health and Well-being. The lab aims to improve living and working conditions for farmworkers via a community-driven research and outreach approach, working with farmworkers to ease the impacts that this work has on immune function and health. 

How the Black Death pandemic is associated with altered immune gene function in post-Black Death populations. Nature (October, 2022) (Jessica secured early funding, contributed functional data and interpretation). This paper was difficult to pull off. It was more than a decade in the making, involved the efforts of lot of people. It’s hard won. Congrats to the Barreiro and Poinar labs.  

On why the emergence and biology and even the social problems highlighted by SARS-CoV-2 aren’t special but the impact of COVID-19 pandemic policy is in Annual Reviews of Anthropology (October 2022) (with Rachel Rusen).

Why do some people get sepsis more often than others – On race and who gets and dies of sepsis in Yearbook of Biological Anthropology (June, 2022) (with J. Grace Shaw)

 In case you missed it

Check out our new paper on primate early immune responses to bacterial and viral infection in PNAS (March, 2021)!

Why are humans so sensitive to lipopolysaccharide and what does that mean for sepsis models? Check out Jessica and Negin’s new paper in Evolutionary Anthropology  (March, 2021).

Check out our new paper on using anthropological techniques in the time of COVID in Journal of Legal Anthropology.  (June, 2020)

The Brinkworth lab has won a UIUC Student Sustainability Award to build a pollinator garden and composting systems across campus.

The Brinkworth lab leads the SUPER Labs Single Use lab Plastics Elimination and Reuse project at UIUC with funding from the  Student Sustainability Committee 

We are happily funded by the NSF to investigate the role of infectious pandemics in human immune diversity.