Microbes and Social Equity speaker series 2023

This series explores the way that microbes connect public policy, social disparities, and human health, as well as the ongoing research, education, policy, and innovation in this field.

I would like to thank the UMaine Institute of Medicine and the UMaine Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Committee for their support for this series, and acknowledge the work of our MSE members helping to organize this: Emily Wissel, Katherine Daiy, Kieran O’Doherty, Hannah Holland-Moritz, Mallory Choudoir, and Mustafa Saifuddin. I would also like to recognize that the University of Maine is located on Marsh Island in the homeland of the Penobscot Nation.

This presentation is “The human-valued interest in microbiome science is the distillation of human-environmental interactions”, Dr. Stephanie Schnorr

Dr. Schnorr is formally trained as a biological anthropologist and human biologist, and pursued research on the topics of human diet in human evolutionary ecology. She studied the capacity for digesting plant material from wild foods, and how this is facilitated by both technology and the gut microbiome, as an auxiliary adaptative mechanisms in human health. Dr. Schnorr also studied ancient microbiomes from coprolite material, and microbial mutualisms in arthropod and environmental contexts. Extending from her interest in brain growth and nutrition acquisition traits among humans, she picked up the inquiry on environmental provisioning of essential lipids from microbiomes. She transitioned to microbial ecology in pursuit of answers to help reconcile the apparent discontinuity between supply and demand of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in terrestrial ecosystems, driven by prior experience working in human evolutionary theory, and by present perspectives of ecological networks.