People | Biomarkers of Aging Core | Arizona State University

Ben Trumble, PhD

Professor, Arizona State University

Ben Trumble is an evolutionary anthropologist and human biologist who asks a fundamental question: why do people develop chronic diseases as they age? His research brings together evolutionary theory, fieldwork, genomics, biomarker analysis and medical imaging to study how immune function, infectious exposures, physical activity and social environments shape health across the life course.

Working mainly with Indigenous communities in the Bolivian Amazon, along with other populations around the world, he investigates the evolutionary roots of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, inflammation and other chronic conditions of aging. Studying populations whose ways of life differ sharply from industrialized societies helps reveal which features of aging are universal and which stem from recent environmental change, bridging anthropology and medicine.

Affiliations

School of Human Evolution and Social Change · Center for Evolution and Medicine · Institute of Human Origins

btrumble@asu.edu

Staff

Jake Aronoff, PhD

Postdoctoral Scholar

My research has primarily focused on understanding how stress and social inequality impact health and wellbeing across populations and environments, with particular focus on immune function and aging (“immunosenescence”).

I have worked with large population-based studies in the Philippines (Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey) and US (Add Health, Jackson Heart Study), while I am now working with the Tsimane Health and Life History Project. My current research interests include understanding how environmental and lifestyle factors influence the relationship between immune function and brain aging as well as connections between immune and metabolic function (“immunometabolism”).

Angela R. Garcia, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I am a biological anthropologist taking a complex-systems approach to the physiology of health disparities and aging.

My research brings together genetics, gene regulation, psychosocial stress, hormones and immune function, drawing on chronobiology, evolutionary medicine and anthropology to understand variation in risk for cardiometabolic disease and for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. I study how social stressors and ecological exposures, such as parasites, shape neuroendocrine-immune signaling and gene expression, with field research in Utila, Honduras and with the Tsimane and Mosetén in Bolivia. I received my PhD in Biological Anthropology from UC Santa Barbara.