Skip to main content

Khristopher Nicholas, a PhD student in the department of Nutrition, received the Triangle Center for Evolutionary Medicine (TriCEM) Graduate Student Award to continue his research on the Galápagos islands in the summer of 2020. Khristopher’s work examines how individuals who were exposed to undernutrition in childhood on mainland Ecuador respond to new, obesogenic environments on the Galápagos. In the summer of 2020, he will seek to identify the consequences of this nutritional mismatch on Santa Cruz island among children and adults.

This project on Santa Cruz island, the most densely populated of the Galápagos islands, will provide an opportunity for unique inter-island comparisons of food environments, diets, and health. Our team’s prior research on Isabela and San Cristóbal islands suggests that each island unique underlying characteristics that impact food and water security. Ultimately, we hope to identify how the built and social environments impact physical and mental health in the Galápagos so that we may inform future interventions to improve health throughout the archipelago.

Read more about Khristopher and his work here.

Comments are closed.