Biological Anthropology

Katherine Daiy

Katherine Daiy is a human biologist whose research examines how shifting and inequitable environments shape human biology and health. Using a biocultural lens, she investigates how global and local processes intersect with maternal-child biology and health during sensitive periods of early development, with a particular focus on the human gut microbiome, human milk composition, nutrition, metabolism, and non-communicable disease risk. 

The primary goals of her research program are to understand (1) how social and biological processes become intertwined within the maternal-child nexus and (2) how global and local systems pattern biology through developmental plasticity. Using a mixed-methods, interdisciplinary approach, she integrates biological and multi-omic data on the human microbiome, human milk composition, and related aspects of maternal-infant biology with contextual data on local socioecology, maternal-child nutrition, and household environments. She further incorporates qualitative research on perceptions, practices, and decision-making surrounding health, illness, medicine, and the body to understand how biological processes are embedded within their broader social and ecological contexts.

Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Daiy was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at The Ohio State University from 2025 to 2026. 

Degrees and Education

PhD, Yale University, 2024

Research Description

Her research program includes several ongoing collaborative projects.

In collaboration with the Samoan Obesity, Lifestyle, and Genetic Adaptations (OLaGA) Study Group, she worked with communities in Samoa to examine how, within an ongoing nutrition transition, variation in maternal diet shapes infant growth through the human milk and infant gut microbiomes in early infancy. Her work in Samoa also explored maternal-child health-related decision-making across multiple levels: she has studied governmental decision-making surrounding breastfeeding-supportive policies in collaboration with the Samoan Ministry of Health and, with urban and rural Samoan communities, has conducted qualitative work on women's perceptions and utilization of antibiotics within a health landscape shaped by strong antibiotic-stewardship messaging and dual health modalities. Her continuing research in Samoa examines relationships among rural-urban variation in infant complementary diets, food/water security, gut microbial and metabolic development, and growth in infants 4–8 months of age. This project seeks to illuminate how globalization-driven nutrition transitions become connected to gut metabolic activity, the microbiome, and growth across weaning, a key life-history stage.

OLaGA Study Group Website: https://www.olaga.org/

With the Ecoculturing the Infant Microbiome Project, Dr. Daiy conducts research in the urban Brazilian Amazon to understand how stark socioeconomic inequity becomes biologically embodied during early life through the infant gut microbiome. In this collaborative, longitudinal project bridging The Ohio State University, the Federal University of Pará, and the University of São Paulo, she and her colleagues examine how household socioeconomic resources, nutrition, and other dimensions of local socioecology pattern gut microbial development across the first two years of life in Belém, Brazil, a city with wide socioeconomic disparities. This work uses the microbiome as a window into the biological embodiment of inequitable urban environments, asking how socioecological conditions become incorporated into, or buffered by, biology and caregiving practices, with potential effects on child health.

Dr. Daiy also explores how ideas about human adiposity (“fat”), body size, and health are produced at the intersection of biology, culture, and social experience. In NamQom, Argentina, she has worked with Indigenous Qom communities and the Chaco Area Reproductive Ecology Program to research how body-size norms and body image are shaped by family, peers, media, and Western biomedicine within a market-integrating context. This work provides insight into how globalizing ideas about body size interact with local understandings of bodies and health in complex ways. She brings these questions into the classroom through the course “Fat: Biology, Evolution, and Society,” which examines human adiposity/fatness across biological, evolutionary, and sociocultural dimensions.

Dr. Daiy is developing a community-engaged, mixed-methods research project in Pittsburgh on how neighborhood food environments shape maternal biology, health, and nutrition during pregnancy and the postpartum period. She welcomes inquiries from interested community partners, potential graduate and undergraduate students, and research collaborators

 

Publications

Daiy, K. E., Bertacchi, V., Choy, C. C., Vesi, L., Savusa, K., Abraham, J. A., Soti-Ulberg, C., Naseri, T., Williams, J. E., McGuire, M. A., McGuire, M. K., Valeggia, C. R., & Hawley, N. L. (2025). Associations among maternal nutrient intake and infant fecal and human milk microbiomes in exclusively breastfeeding Samoan mother-infant dyads. The Journal of Nutrition, 101246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.11.015

Daiy, K., Arslanian, K., Choy, C., Manuele-Magele, A., Soti-Ulberg, C., Hromi-Fiedler, A., Hawley, N., & Pérez-Escamilla, R. (2023). Consensus-building during the Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly (BBF) initiative in Samoa: A qualitative content analysis. PLOS Global Public Health, 3(4), e0001725. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001725

Daiy, K., Frieson, T., Palacio-Londono, L., Barnes, I., Olmedo, S., Aranda, P., et al. (2022). Body norms, body image, and media in a market-integrating Indigenous population in Argentina: A mixed-methods investigation. American Journal of Human Biology, e23813. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23813

Daiy, K., Harries, V., Nyhan, K., & Marcinkowska, U. M. (2022). Maternal weight status and the composition of the human milk microbiome: A scoping review. PLOS ONE, 17(10), e0274950. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274950

Daiy, K., Wiley, K., Allen, J., Bailey, M. T., & Dettmer, A. M. (2025). Associations among rearing environment and the infant gut microbiome with early-life neurodevelopment and cognitive development in a nonhuman primate model (Macaca mulatta). Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, 16, e1. https://doi.org/10.1017/S20401744249000400

Hoi, A. G., Daiy, K., Altman, R., Venners, S., Valeggia, C. R., & Nepomnaschy, P. A. (2021). Postpartum amenorrhea duration by sex of the newborn in two natural fertility populations. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24193

 

Courses

Human Biological Variation; Fat: Biology, Evolution, and Society

Jennifer Muller

Jennifer Muller (PhD, University at Buffalo 2006) is a historical bioarchaeologist whose research explores the biological consequences of discrimination‐based inequities in 19th- and 20th-century African diasporic populations and the institutionalized poor. Her research, which integrates archaeological, archival, ethnographic, and skeletal data, aims to disrupt hegemonic narratives of the poor and the marginalized in the past. Through the investigation of the use of bodies in medical and anthropological training, her scholarship also examines how people who are discriminated against in life may also experience the negative consequences of inequity in death. Prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh, she held appointments with the Department of Anthropology at Ithaca College, the City University of New York, and the W. Montague Cobb Laboratory at Howard University.

Degrees and Education

PhD, University of Buffalo, 2006

Research Description

Much of Jennifer Muller’s research has included bioarchaeological analysis of those interred in poorhouse cemeteries and US anatomical collections. Her research on the Monroe County Poorhouse and the W. Montague Cobb Skeletal Collection focused on the skeletal evidence of trauma and its connections to discrimination and racism in occupational opportunity. In recent years, she has explored trauma and disease in the past and its association with the social dis-abling of individuals with perceived impairments. Beginning in 2013, she has contributed to the Erie County Poorhouse Bioarchaeology Project (Buffalo, NY) through the analysis of the 67 child and infant remains from an excavated portion of the poorhouse. Many of these skeletal remains present with evidence of severe pathology. In- depth research of New York State historical documents reveals that poorhouse children (between 2 and 16 years of age) with perceived physical and mental impairments were considered deviant and unworthy of familial care or transference to orphanages. This research provides insight into the role of socially ascribed disability as a determinant of historical social welfare worthiness. This not only contributes to historical narratives but has direct relevance to our understanding of social welfare policy and practice today.

Critical to Jennifer Muller’s applied and engaged approach is the incorporation of descendant communities in research design, implementation, and outreach/education. She has also been involved in several projects aimed at local and descendant community partnership and advocacy for the preservation of sacred spaces and heritage management.

 

 

Courses

0620 Biocultural Anthropology

0680 Introduction to Biological Anthropology

0681 Introduction to Human Evolution
1600 Human Evolution and Variation

1750 Inequity & the Body

1805 Bioarchaeology

 

Recent Publications
 

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. 2022. A Child Left Behind: Malnutrition and Chronic Illness of a Child from the Erie  County Poorhouse Cemetery. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. doi: 10.1002/oa.3130.

Muller JL. 2021. A Bioarchaeology of Inequality: Lessons from American Institutionalized and Anatomical Skeletal Assemblages. In: O. Cerasuolo (Ed.) Inequality in Antiquity. Buffalo, NY: State University of New York Press.

Muller JL., Byrnes, JF. and Ingleman, DA. 2020. The Erie County Poorhouse (1828–1926) as a Heterotopia: A Bioarchaeological Perspective. In: LA Tremblay and S Reedy (Eds.) The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence: A Theoretical Framework for Industrial Era Inequality. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL. 2020. Reflecting on a More Inclusive Historical Bioarchaeology. Journal of Historical Archaeology 54(1):202-211.

Muller JL. and Butler MS. 2018. At the Intersections of Race, Poverty, Gender, and Science: A Museum Mortuary for Twentieth Century Fetuses and Infants. In: PK Stone (Ed), Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies: New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. (Eds) 2017. Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Part of the series “Bioarchaeology and Social Theory” edited by Debra Martin. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. 2017. Mind the Gap: Bridging Disability Studies and Bioarchaeology – An Introduction. In: JF Byrnes and JL Muller (Eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL. 2017. Rendered Unfit: ‘Defective’ Children in the Erie County Poorhouse. In: JF Byrnes and JL Muller (Eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL, Pearlstein K, and de la Cova C. 2016. Dissection and documented skeletal collections: legal embodiment of inequality. In: KC Nystrom (ed) The Bioarchaeology of Autopsy and Dissection in the United States. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series, Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Watkins RJ and Muller JL. 2015. Repositioning the Cobb Human Archive: the merger of a skeletal collection and its texts. American Journal of Human Biology 27(1):41-50.