This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Biological Anthropology program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Rosita Worl at the Sealaska Heritage Institute, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating to what degree consuming traditional foods and participating in subsistence harvesting activities can help Indigenous communities in southeast Alaska maintain a healthy oral microbiome. The community of bacterial species and other microbes living in the mouth (the oral microbiome) play a critical role in supporting human health, both within and beyond the mouth. Dietary intake can impact the composition and function of the microbes living in the oral microenvironment. While previous research has compared communities with different subsistence methods and different population histories, this project will provide a more contextualized and fine-scaled analysis of how the oral microbiome responds to dietary variation by working in collaboration with Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit communities of southeast Alaska. The project addresses existing limitations in understanding the relationship between diet and the oral microbiome by analyzing how variation in the types and amounts of traditional foods consumed drives intra-/inter-individual variation in the oral microbiome. This research will illustrate to what extent maintaining elements of the traditional hunter-fisher-gatherer diet can support a healthy, diverse oral microbiome in these Alaska Native communities, with implications for understanding the evolution of the human oral microbiome more broadly as well as the impact of industrialized foods on human health and biological function.
The aims of this project will be achieved through community-collaborative research with Indigenous communities in southeast Alaska. The researcher will engage in archival research and facilitate community focus groups to identify the various social, economic, environmental, and political factors shaping Alaska Native subsistence practices in southeast Alaska. This contextualizing data will be paired with survey data from four Alaska Native communities, two rural and two urban, to assess to what extent individuals participate in traditional subsistence activities and consume traditional foods. Finally, oral microbiome samples will be collected via oral gumline swabs to examine how the oral microbiome in these communities is shaped by the consumption of traditional foods. The community-collaborative research methods employed in the study will provide a more nuanced understanding of how and when the oral microbiome shifts in response to dietary changes. Importantly, this research will combat the existing ascertainment bias in the field of human microbiome studies, where Indigenous communities are underrepresented, and provide new insight into the factors shaping how or why Indigenous communities choose to participate in genomic research.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
