An integrative framework and recommendations for the study of DNA methylation in the context of race and ethnicity
Authors (first, second and last of 4)
Collection
Social Genomics: Examining Gene Expression in Context
Social and behavioral scientists have made important contributions to our understanding of gene-environment interplay for more than a century. Drawing on this tradition, human social genomics is an emerging field of research that examines how social conditions affect patterns of gene expression, with implications for human development, behavior, and health. The emergence of novel methods for collecting gene expression data as part of large-scale social research is presenting new opportunities for discovery at the biosocial interface. And yet, these same data create new challenges for data analysis, for increasingly close collaboration among social and biological scientists, and for leveraging these data to advance the social sciences. This special collection welcomes contributions that combine gene expression data with measures of social context and experience to inform the study of human health. Guiding questions include (but are not limited to): What social, economic, and cultural circumstances influence patterns of gene expression of relevance to health, broadly defined? And how do expression patterns, in turn, influence people’s health-related social circumstances and behaviors? Ideally such questions are studied with a life course perspective, which emphasizes long-term patterns across many years of life, social roles in institutions, inequality, and age/period/cohort models. Contributions may include original research articles but also perspectives, registered reports, and reviews. Papers should focus on the integration of social and expression data in both conceptual and statistical models, and consider strengths and limitations of these approaches.
Keywords: Social genomics, Life course, Biosocial, Population health, Inequality, Health disparities, Stress
Editors
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Thomas McDade
Prof. Thomas McDade, the Carlos Montezuma Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, USA He is a biological anthropologist who conducts research on how social and ecological contexts shape human biology and health over the life course. Much of this work focuses on the long-term effects of early developmental environments, and the integration of biological measures into population-based, social science research.
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Simone Ghislandi
Prof. Simone Ghislandi (DPhil), Associate Professor of Public Economics in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University, Italy He is coordinator of the “Welfare and taxation” unit of DONDENA, and director of the Master in Economics and Management of Government and International Organizations (GIO) in Bocconi. He is also a member of the POPJUS Programme in IIASA (Vienna). He focuses his research activity on issues related to health economics, demography, public and health policy, writing on a variety of topics including wellbeing, policy evaluation, universal health coverage and healthcare management.
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Michael Shanahan
Prof. Michael Shanahan, Professor of sociology and leader of the Social Genomics Lab, University of Zürich, Switzerland He has also served as director of the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development. His primary research and teaching interests focus on inequalities in health, particularly social correlates of gene expression patterns. He has also held professorships at Pennsylvania State University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (as Hewlett Fellow), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
