Before learning about Dr. Michelle Lampl at Emory, I didn’t really think about anthropology and medicine as areas that would overlap very much. Her career shows why the 2 areas fit together pretty well.
Dr. Lampl has both an MD and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research at Emory includes biological anthropology, medical anthropology, nutrition, and human growth and development. She is also the director of Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health.
Her research on human growth is a good example of why medicine can touch so many areas and not just biology. The human body obviously involves biology, but health is also influenced by behavior, nutrition, environment and social conditions. Studying only one of those areas would give us an incomplete picture of what’s happening to the human body.
Dr. Lampl’s research helped establish that human growth occurs in bursts rather than as one smooth process. She has continued studying the roles of nutrition, hormones, the immune system, genetics and environmental influences.
This approach reminds me of what makes public health different from simply studying disease. Public health actually looks beyond a single patient and considers all of the factors affecting their health. This is also another reason I found this program at Emory so interesting. The Center for the Study of Human Health was created to bring together knowledge from different disciplines and apply it to individual and population health.
Dr. Lampl’s career shows me that studying medicine doesn’t have to mean looking at health through just one way. Sometimes the answers to interesting questions exist between different fields.
