The Amazing Work of Bridget Algee-Hewitt, PhD

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the nonprofit I founded, the center for Global Initiatives. The center is an all volunteer organization so there are no salaries and thus all tax deductible donations can go to the work. While our key country partner is in Tanzania, our work is global and generally focused in the areas of education and healthcare. We also help others to get their nonprofits started or augment others project based initiatives. It's our goal to open source humanitarian intervention and to help make it easier for others to do more good in the world. We are proud to have been ranked a great nonprofit every year since 2011 and to have achieved a Platinum level rating by Guidestar Links in this episode's show, notes will take you to published articles on our outcomes, a number of helpful tools and downloadable resources which are all free always. Please Visit us at CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org and be sure to watch our video at Patreon.com DrChrisStout to learn more. Thanks welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. I think this will be an especially poignant episode with a very special guest, my dear friend, Dr. Bridget Algee Hewitt. She's a senior research scientist at Stanford University's center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and a quantitative researcher in Facebook's SBG Data Science Research and Development Division. Bridget is a biological anthropologist who studies how skeletal and genetic traits vary among contemporary peoples among across time and space. She develops new computational methods using machine learning and artificial intelligence and geographic mapping algorithms and hands on DNA and ostology laboratory approaches to improve estimation of the personality pardon me, personal identity parameters essential in forensic identification of unknown human remains and for the paleo demographic reconstruction of past population histories in bioarchaeology. As a practicing forensic anthropologist and geneticist, she provides forensic casework consultation in the medical legal community. She also delivers expert testimony for asylum petitions and advocates for policy change in support of undocumented migrant and refugee rights. Her social justice work focuses on immigration, displacement, poverty and violence in Latin America, addressing in particular the crisis of migrant deaths along the US Mexico border. Bridget received her PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an MA in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr and a BA in Classics and Art History from Mount Allison University. Bridget is an advisory member for the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti Oppressive Praxis at the Stan School of Medicine, and she is the book and Resource review editor for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Welcome to the show, Bridget.

Thank you, Chris. I'm so pleased to be here. It's such a delight.

Likewise. You and I were talking off mic before the show started about your history and your background and your work. And I just want to kind of phrase this in the context of past listeners or frequent listeners may recall that we've had episodes where we've had guests that are experts in forensic and. And in artificial intelligence and big data and genetics and anthropology. We even had an artist who used randomly found public DNA to create sculptures of individuals predicated on that DNA. But your work really seems to be an integration of all these areas and certainly even more. And I love the social justice aspect of it. So perhaps as a way to get started, could you share with us what drew you to biological anthropology and really what biological anthropology constitutes?

Of course. So I had a very circuitous route. I think your description of my degrees and the work that I do sort of speaks to that. I would say that for me, the passion that drives my more formal research program is computational and really pattern analysis. And I started out as a fine artist, and for me, there was a structure to the kind of art that I created. And language was always an important component of that. And the way that we study populations and history from an archaeological perspective is through their material culture, their art, their remains, their architecture. Right. And also through their literature. And I really got interested in the ways that we can apply computational schools to study that, to see those patterns and to tease them out. And the more involved that I became in the archaeological side, I was really drawn into the study of skeletal remains to really understand the human. And as I was working through my degrees, I think became dissatisfied with my own position as the elite researcher and wanting to be able to contribute to this larger issue of forensic identification. So I was halfway through a PhD in archaeology. I packed up, drove to Tennessee, had never been to the south before, threw myself into a completely different program, and the rest is history at Tennessee. I should say that Knoxville is one of the premiere programs for studying forensic anthropology. And it was an exceptionally rewarding experience. And I can't thank Lee Jantz and Richard Jantz and Lyle Konigsberg enough for all their mentorship and support there. So that sort of got me on that pathway to doing forensic things. But I still had this computational interest, so it kind of married itself together where I looked at how we can use math to better understand aspects about what it is to be human and how those human aspects are played out in our biology. And I think the fact that I cover all these different areas is because we're really complex. And to speak to what it is to be us, we have to have an understanding of how our biology interacts with our environment, that interacts with social constraints, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not someone who enjoys to pass off the work. Someone else I may hands on up to my elbows in the lab. And the same way computationally that I, you know, do my coding and write my programs. And so the. To really understand what I'm doing and to appreciate the weightiness that comes with doing forensic work, I felt that I just needed to be able to speak as an expert, or as much as an expert as one can be to the. All the areas that really define forensic work and to just sort of. To back up for a moment. What a biological anthropologist does in the forensic setting is ultimately try to identify for unknown human remains, so missing persons, homicide cases as well, all those things that are on your driver's license, the ways that your family, your friends, your loved ones would describe you. So there's this complex negotiation between studying what you are biologically and then how you're presented and how you perceive yourself and how other people perceive you social biologically. So there's a lot of cultural anthropologists in me just as much as there is the human biologist. And I think that is also so I. I know I should have warned you that I'm a talker.

Awesome. This is great.

Keep going. When I was doing my PhD, I had this really great statistics professor, and he said to me, you know, why don't you just give up this anthropology gig and just go be a statistician? And I really struggled with this because I do love the statistics and the analysis. And then I realized that I really care about people. And to be able to do anthropology that ties together the science of biology, the mathematics of the computation, and the social justice aspect of the people is, you know, I say to my students, that's my jam. So I'm very lucky to have sort of fallen into this strange, long pathway and then to be at Stanford, in the center for race and ethnicity. It allows me to speak to humanists about these biological issues and to also understand from a humanist perspective issues of race and identity and to really have that all come full circle. So I'm kind of a jack of all trades, I hope an expert and maybe a few.

I so love that, Bridget. I mean, I feel from science the aspect of, you know, everyone's so reductionistic. I mean, I come from a background of, you know, in clinical science, psychology, of looking at outcome studies and looking at, you know, if this, then that and what causes this and whatever. And as I've grown older, I have found very much the shift of saying, you know, multiple causality. You know, it's sort of like if you try to distinguish one thing and take a look at it, at the literally ignoring and ignorance of the other aspects, it's sort of like you're fooling yourself. It's like the drunk looking for the keys under the proverbial street lamp. So how do you, I mean, I'm just, I'm so impressed with, with the, the synth synthesis of all these kinds of things. Where, in looking at your cv, where did you pick up coding in that whole aspect? Just out of my own curiosity.

Necessity, I think. You know, I mean, coding is another language. So for me it was, you know, not that far from Greek and Latin. I also grew up speaking French, so I've worked very hard on my non regional diction. So translation was always something that was very familiar. And then it's just translating what we see as those patterns in language to patterns in computer language to the language of human biology. Genetics is a code. The features that we look for on the skeleton is a code. Migration patterns are codes. So there's a lot of synthesis that can happen in approaches which I think is really exciting. To your point about the singular focus, I think that is one of the perhaps scariest in the advances of science at the moment where academic institutions have become so focused on the minutiae and the fissioning and we have exceptionally trained scholars in tiny little areas. And when it comes to understanding these big picture issues, it's rare that you have the luxury of bringing 17 people in to work on a case. And it's rare that that actually ever works out very well because you have competing interests and alternate philosophies. So. So I think the forensic work is a testament to the need and to the value of thinking globally and holistically and bringing an understanding and appreciation, if not expertise, to the things you don't know. I always tell my Students that what I hope that they walk away from my classes is not a textbook knowledge, but the knowledge of what they didn't know. Because you can find out anything or you can find anyone to help you with it. But if you're not versed in the breadth of the issues, then you know you're not able to contribute.

Yeah, I so agree. And good for you. Tip of the hat with that with kind of insinuating that into the student's curriculum and coursework. The aspect that I've also learned, which has just humble role compared to the work that you do, was most recently I was involved in a lot of orthopedic studies. And when I started migrating from psychology to orthopedics, it was sort of this exclusion criteria and exclusion criteria and exclusion criteria. So they would kind of winnow things down to such a small number of biological variables, if you will, physiological variables that I felt the generalizability of whatever they found was so limited that it was very difficult to apply to practice. And now with the aspect of larger databases and big data and dealing with unstructured databases, to be able to do something with all those kinds of data and to now have like clinicaltrials.gov, we put together a couple of patient registries so we could have very large data sets to play around in. And it seems like that's sort of in some sense the case of you as well. Maybe with the whole aspect of big data and large data sets, I would imagine you have much more exposure to those kinds of things via social media consultations that you do versus anthropological kinds of findings because those kinds of data just aren't there. But does that sort of get to some of the work that you do when you're looking at a forensic case, which is an n of 1, does that, does that work then get informed by the larger data sets or how, how do you start to put together things when you're dealing with a case?

Yeah, of course. So I think fundamentally I see myself as a human biologist, broadly defined, past and present. So I have to understand the patterns of human biology over evolutionary history to really appreciate what makes us different in present day. Because a lot of the aspects that make us look different are conserved from, you know, the out of Africa migration. So to first and foremost you have to have an appreciation for that broad history and the phenotypes that emerged from it. And then we also have databases that represent contemporary variation. So all the effects of small scale population history and recent movement that changes how we look and how our genetics are shaped. So those help us inform and they can be used as our priors for our mathematical models for estimation. One of the things, however, that is challenging about that is until, I guess, very recently, and I tend to even hit a disciplinary barrier with the issue of admixture and non admixed populations. And there was always these sort of standard of models where reference databases represented Europeans or they represented African Americans, much in the way that we saw it in genetics, and I'm sure in, you know, many other clinical contexts, that there are source populations and they're opportunistically acquired and they tend to be similar because you want to look at consistency in one group to understand the range of variation. So then you can compare it to other groups. Right. But that starts to define the way that we make models and then we start thinking of people as bounded populations. And that's a problem both practically and computationally because it means that you are always assigning someone to some potential group or estimating who they are based on some prior that is one of a select number, instead of thinking about the individual as potentially being a mixture of many groups. So I think these databases really need to be turned on their head in terms of how we're thinking about them. And that's been a large part of my recent work is to really drive home the importance of thinking in a unsupervised, unbounded mixture kind of way, acknowledging that the American population, including Latin America, so the Americas broadly defined, is so diverse, and its diversity comes from the fact that we were, with the exception of the first peoples, we were never non admixed. So we are a mixture of many originating or what we call parental populations. So to think of groups as being isolated biological entities is very short sighted. And I don't mean that in like a Blumenbach racialized category way, but to think of that there are not clear and very important overlaps that occur between people who identify themselves as white versus people who identify as those social terms that often inform how identifications are done are, you know, very fluid in terms of biology. So we need to think about the fluidity at the forefront and then try to figure out where that person fits down the line. So I think to your point, these databases are fantastic and in some ways they're kind of constraining because they impose on the researcher models or ways to think about your model. And I, I'm hoping that, that we can start thinking about models that actually speak the way we consider ourselves. So a little less scientific and maybe a little More social. Yeah, there's that anthropologist in me again, I guess.

I like that. It's. It's almost like thinking about your. The bias perhaps potentially built into a model and sort of like then the meta bias of the model itself. It does ground it, I think a lot. When you speak about the social context and social aspect of it then so maybe that's a good segue. I really enjoyed, I read your article in Medium with Casey Miller about the U.S. mexico border camps and COVID 19 and the medical care or lack thereof or challenges thereof and humanitarian relief efforts. Can you maybe sketch out that situation that you observed, but then also how you got there and what your work was there and the relief efforts there.

So I'm actually very fortunate to have been able to pair with Casey. And Casey was the human rights advocate who was actually boots on the ground at the time. So I didn't have the opportunity to work in that particular camp. But I am doing a lot of the computational work to try to better understand the effects of COVID on the particular groups, whether along the border or in the detention centers. And it's a secondary humanitarian crisis, I will say, especially in the detention centers, because we're speaking about within the US borders right at this point. So this is on us as Americans. And I actually have a project with a group of undergraduate students who are brilliant and motivated activists, but very passionate academics as well. And that's not an easy role to occupy.

True, that's very true.

Very true. Yes. And we're looking at the incidence of COVID 19 within detention centers and the relative incident of COVID 19 in the counties and the states in which those centers are located. And we're finding that the detention centers have obviously a much higher incident rate because as we saw in studies of incarcerated groups, that it creates this microcosm in which disease flourishes. Right. So there is a huge humanitarian issue that is within our own bounds, let alone what occurs in the unbounded areas of the border regions. And then the border is complicated on so many levels from the virus prevalence, the lack of health care, and then also those social issues of many people who live along in the border area have family on one side or the other. And with the lockdown of borders and the disbanding of camps, and it essentially separates families all over again. So it's a tacit or a latent effort in family separation, which I think also contributes. I'm sure, as you can speak to as someone who works with obviously biology and psychology, the importance of well being to Healing and that family and support systems are critical to that. Removing that is just as much, I think, as dangerous as the lack of, you know, immediate access to treatment as well.

I was.

And then there's also. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Just not to interrupt, just to add to this, I was just also reading that sort of this, this maybe reactionary attempt to counterbalance that was basically solitary confinement for people which then, you know, part and parcel brings a whole nother myriad of problems, you know, psychologically and emotionally as well too. So I didn't mean to interrupt, but it's just like it's, it is a huge atrogenic problem that I think again, you like, you make the good point. Secondary humanitarian crisis. I never thought of it about it that way, but you're absolutely right.

Yeah. So the solitary confinement is just sort of a tangible example of the marginalization that goes on without that kind of effort. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the Latin American immigrants are marginalized in their home countries. They don't want to have to make this very dangerous journey to the US give up everything they own. There's a motivating and critical factor that's threatening their life, their families, well being and you know, for their forced migrants. So they're already marginalized where they originated. They come to live or attempt to cross in the shadows. So they will remain marginalized if they are fortunate enough to get into the US and by then sending them back to the border into these remain in Mexico camps or to be in detention centers is just another form of marginalization. Isolation. And it's the social psychological component to that is huge.

And so Casey, if memory serves, Casey's part of an organization to try and help address those kinds of things, at least on one side of the border.

Yes, so, so Casey is an amazing person. She has the ability to float between many organizations. So she is, she works where there is need and she has been spending time in Tijuana and Matamoros and you know, just going where she can help. And I, she is inspirational to, to those of us on the academic side. And while I have the, the on the ground work and experience, it pales in comparison to the kind of efforts that she and the people that she works with on a day to day basis, you know, are able to realize.

Well, it takes those kinds of things. I mean, I have friends and colleagues similar to you and Casey, where there's this kind of ensemble cast that comes into an area and some folks are the boots on the ground and doing what needs to get done and working to create sustainable change. And then there's also the, if you will, scientific aspect of things to measure impact and to measure baseline and look at clinical outcomes. And it's almost like you guys in the academic side with your students create de facto epidemiologists of looking to see what's the covariance between someone that's in a camp versus not in a camp. And I think all of those kinds of data, who else is going to do that? It's sort of like those are the kinds of things that then help put a scientific backbone to what the problems are to identify them as true and real problems. If the data support that and that if there are changes made or interventions conducted, that then you've got a way to see what difference are these things making? Is it mitigated enough where it's no longer a crisis and a problem? You know, to me, those are just really part and parcel of again, kind of speaking to your work that these things are blended and work together in a mutually supportive kind of way. Ultimately for a humanitarian reason.

Yeah, it's always a very complex negotiation between trying to present the science and also have the human side to the science so that it's interpretable. And then on the flip side, for the people who are the regular everyday boots on the ground, on the border to have the cataloging of that daily work and those efforts and have it, have it in a framework that is taken seriously and respected. And so it's, it's very. I don't think we've done a really great job at trying to marry the two yet. And I'm working on it and I have ideas, but it's still very foreign in academia to be thinking about reaching the larger community. So my summer project was, I have several students who are pursuing all sort of border related projects in the summer. And we decided that one of the students would be tasked with making a website. And everything is interactive. So all of our data, you can go on and look at the maps and you can scroll over them and see numbers and places to try to humanize the actual results. And an aspect to that is we're doing ethnographic interviews of people who have been affected by ICE raids to try to demonstrate that these are your neighbors, these are the mothers and daughters and fathers and uncles and all those people that you know in your community that you would not otherwise assume that they have had such difficulty and hardship and been so resilient in the things that they have overcome. And to recognize that from very Personal perspective, I think I am hoping will do a lot to give traction to the more academic and scientific papers that come out on those issues as well. We're very eager to develop a model that will also help with identifying potentiality of. Of target points. And so it's, there's. There are ways that the, the intellectual can interact with the social on so many humanitarian levels. And I think that's what's exciting about working with very ambitious students who have a passion for making change because they. They come up with I really. Is this possible? And then, you know, as an academic, you can never say no.

Right.

So then of course, it becomes, well, let's just change everything we thought we would do and go down this route, and it's just unbelievably rewarding. So this summer has been great and it's pretty cool. Now I'm a NLP person, so I do text mining and computational stuff in a different realm that I hadn't expected that I would get into. Because to study the latent trends in people's language in these ethnographic recordings is, you know, it's interesting to be able to do that from the mathematical way because it allows you to get to what people are saying without them actually saying it.

Yeah.

And I think the nuance and the undertones tell us more about people's emotions and feelings and perspective on things than sometimes the actual words.

Gosh, there's so many things that brings up. Gosh. I guess first of all, we'll have to get that link in the show notes that you're talking about of the new website. That sounds amazing. I want to take a look at that and drill around myself. Secondly, it really reminds me of kind of the humanizing the other, I think so often especially, you know, where there's a border or where there's an us and them or, you know, the other, the proverbial the other. I have some colleagues that I've worked with some years ago that, you know, have, you know, put together courses and do things for schools and things like that to try and show the sim more the similarities of appreciation, appreciating the diversity, but then also, you know, highlighting the similarities that people aren't necessarily as different and where there might be superficial differences or visible differences, that life, you know, how people live their life and what people want and those kinds of things. Oftentimes there's a universality to that that gets blinded by virtue of circumstance. You know, what side of a border you're on and what side of a border you want to be on. So I think that's fantastic. And I grew up a million years ago. I had a friend and colleague, Steve Wein, who's a psychiatrist at University of Illinois at the College of Medicine. He's now chairing the center for Global Health. And he's done a lot of work in ethnicity. And he showed me. He worked with refugees from the Balkans war, from Kosovo that were in Chicago and would go to Kosovo quite frequently years and years ago, and introduced me to a statistical program that was called Atlas Ti that looked at quantifying qualitative data and looking at narratives and deconstructing transcripts. And I was just fascinated by it. And it sounds like that has advanced based from what you were just saying of these nuanced kinds of things. So can you just let me satisfy my little. Scratch my geek itch here? So how does that work computationally without going to, you know, too much of a nerdy rabbit hole, but at least that I can understand from a naive perspective, of course.

So we take the text and we remove all those words that are common in the English language. We get rid of punctuation and all the things that create noise. And then we treat each one of the words as a. As a data point, and we look at patterns within those data points. So you can see how individuals coalesce in their language. You can pull out most frequent or distinctive sentences, words, idioms. There's ways to actually look at the sentiment associated with particular words. So we know that some words solicit or elicit particular feelings, and in an order within a sentence, in combination with other words, you can look at how those sentiments are transmitted through the language. So that. That is a kind of the. One of the best examples in terms of what I meant when I said that you can get what people are actually meaning without actually without reading the words.

Wow.

So you can say something. And you know how email is quite. I feel email is quite dangerous because I will say something by email, and it is very easily misinterpreted because you do not have that careful reading. Right. Of the tone and the presentation of the language. So this actually lets you kind of dive into that where the words may say one thing, but the sentiments associated with that combination of words in that whole dialogue can tell you something different.

Wow.

So I'm very excited about ways that this can be used to other things. I've noticed working with, speaking with refugees, that refugees from different locations speak very differently about their experience. And I would think that there's possibilities there for creating models around how experience is expressed in language. And then does that help the clinician to maybe better understand treatment protocols if there's a way to get at the experience when perhaps the patient isn't at the point yet in their recovery trajectory to be able to, you know, disclose their whole experience. So I think there are many ways that this kind of work can dovetail with other areas of research. But of course, there I'm totally outside my field and completely ripping my pie in the sky ideas. But sometimes those are the ones that take you down a path that can actually be.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and here you say to me that the aspect of using it clinically, that should have occurred to me first, Bridges. And so touche. But, yeah, that's really. I mean, I will ponder this once we finished our conversation, but that is just truly fascinating to think about it in the context of, you know, the, like a clinical session and also, you know, to just, you know, use it also with the therapist to see, you know, are there nuanced kinds of words or the things that maybe are triggering for the client, et cetera, et cetera, and see how that might covary by virtue of, you know, the relationship that the therapist and patient have, the type of therapy being used, the type of diagnosis the patient presents with that kind of a thing, that would be. That'd be a fascinating application of these kinds of technologies. That's a goosebumpy kind of thing that gets me going. So I want to maybe dive in a little more to the. The AI aspect of these things. I saw your Stanford Institute of, I think it was the Human Artificial Intelligence Conference. The conference was on AI ethics policy and governance, and your talk was on race rights and facial recognition. Could you talk about some of the social justice aspects you spoke on, and in particular, how the geopolitical situations can change our biology with. With trauma and how that trauma may play out epigenetically and pass intergenerationally. I thought that was fascinating.

Yeah, of course. So trauma has a effect on the immediate biology. It can create, again, outside of my area and into yours, a lot of emotional reactions. Right. That have disease correlations. Or you can fill me in on the most appropriate terminology.

That's good.

You're great. But then from a longer term biological perspective, we can pass on these changes that occur within our biology to our next generations. And that being in a traumatic environment as a parent means even if your child is not exposed to that, the trauma is no longer just affecting you, but it affects generations that follow you. So what we do. I think if we think about this in terms of the border context again as well and you know, family separation policies, what we are doing to these ones group of people at this one moment in time has repercussions that go beyond them, but to their generations and generations afterwards. And you know, there are huge human rights and humanity beyond humanitarian questions that come with that. Ethical questions, yes, in terms of family separation, but also larger scale human rights questions as to what it, what it means for us to be able to make decisions that ultimately affect the core biology of people and their offspring. And that's that, that's I think, just mind blowing to me.

Yeah.

And then so, so these are kind of the policy questions that I'm really interested in. And then the AI and rights is sort of along those same lines that we start developing technologies that allow us to in some idea that we're improving society. Right. Because this is going to make us safer and it ends up ultimately marginalizing particular groups because we don't totally understand yet the way these technologies play across variation. Right. Because they're created. And just like when we, as I mentioned earlier with these databases, we create them on a particular test set. We don't create them on a, you know, full sampling of the range of variation of the United States. So it's always going to have some black boxy quality when it's applied to other groups. And we found that when certain facial recognition technologies are applied to particular populations, they act differently. And that means that you're more likely or less likely to be able to be identified based on the facial recognition correctly. So that doesn't mean though that the standards for which these are applied change. Right. So if it's believed that this is 99% accurate, then even though we know it's potentially not in these other groups, that doesn't stop the use of IT and the publication of it in those areas in which it would like to be used as 99.9% effective. So there has to be these larger movements that recognize the pitfalls to the science. And I think, you know, San Francisco has been remarkable in its work on facial recognition and attempting to regulate and ban its use until there's better understanding of the implications and how it works with all peoples. That isn't to say that I'm someone who says we shouldn't move science forward and that we have to be overly regulated. I think there's responsibility that needs to come before regulation and I think that is what lacks that. Often we can have lots of regulation and it doesn't mean that we are making responsible ethical choices. And I think that also comes with the researcher. I put a lot on myself and my colleagues that I think it needs to be within the academic setting where these. Where we can no longer see ourselves as operating in a cloistered academic environment, where what we do exists within a vacuum. And we have to acknowledge that with the, you know, social media and access to information from all aspects of the sciences and worldwide. Right. That we have to be aware that what we may produce in our little microcosm is going to reach someone all across the other side of the world for use in their microcosm in a way that was maybe never intended, but in a way that we never mentioned or thought about regulating or self regulating in what our choices are. One of the examples that's been used is the role of facial recognition in China and whether or not the interaction between genetics and facial recognition and the risks that that poses for privacy and civil safety, et cetera, and that's sort of one of the things that I call the compound technology effect. That we may feel that we've also been very responsible and ethical in what we're doing with one kind of analysis or one technology that we're studying, but we haven't because of this visioning that occurs in academia where we stay within our lane, that we haven't thought about the interaction effects with someone else's discovery technology and how that can ultimately produce something through the interaction that wasn't there in its singular form. So we always have to be prospective, not retrospective. And I think that is difficult for scientists and discovery is to think that we need to. Just the way that we design our studies, we need to be designing them with the larger ethical questions in mind, which, you know, is something that IRB does not get at and doesn't address. And you know, you can be a very ethical researcher, but not think broadly ethically. And I think that's where we have more work to do.

Wow. Well, put this. You know, it touches on what you also talked about in that Stanford presentation, the grand ethical challenge in that. And I think you've spoken to that a great deal with this. It's interesting, the context. I mean, you think about 50 years ago and you know, kind of the total lack of informed consent about things and, and you see people in the 40s getting Nobel laureates for frontal lobotomies and things, you know, that just seem as horrific today. And the aspect of looking at ethics and applications of kind of what we look at and what science is seen as, and I think you're spot on the aspect of having a bit of a perspective beyond just the study at hand. But to say, well, what are the ramifications of whatever the findings are that we get of this? And I think as researchers and scientists and perhaps grant driven folks, you just want to get it done, you want to get the publication, you want to make that contribution to knowledge and you know, continue to build and you know, work from those findings on to the next thing. But the aspect of thinking about the use of everyone wants their research to be read and to be applied and you know, to make a difference, but then to think about what are the untoward unthought about consequences of it being, you know, misunderstood, misused, used for, you know, non positive kinds of kinds of things. It's a Manhattan Project kind of risk, I guess with, with application of yes, we can do it, but you know, should we do it or what should we do with our findings once we learn what we learn?

And I think it's educators. Oh, sorry, no, go ahead.

Oh please go ahead.

I was just going to say I think that also falls on us as educators. That I mean I was raised with the, you know, we let the science tell the story, right, because we want to be unbiased, right. So we, the data is what drives the analysis. But I think we need to really rethink that and have our students question and interrogate that. I struggle with this myself. So in terms of doing the forensic work, so I, as a forensic anthropologist and geneticist, you have a expectation of what your role is, right? That you have this commitment to identifying those who are unidentified or to making matches between a K to Q match a known to an unknown. And you know, that's what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to do that as best to our ability. And as I worked more with families and immigrant communities and people who are actually those that we are, that are science effects and that these activities affect, I, you know, really hit that cris de conscience where this is what my academic discipline says I should be doing. But is this really what they want? Like they being people that I serve? Because there is no more othering that can occur than for me to presume that I am in some position of authority where I can dictate who gets identified and who doesn't get identified based on my own personal assumption of doing the right thing. We don't, I don't understand the risks of why many of the immigrants have chosen to, you know, leave their home countries. There's gang violence, there's political unrest, there's nutritional insufficiency, there's natural disaster. These are all things that are not familiar to me in my, you know, very fortunate, I will say, cushy existence. And for me to be the one that dictates whether or not someone's child, parent, loved one should be identified and what ramifications that can have on the rest of that family is very arrogant, short sighted, risky. And I think we have to have more of these conversations where we're not working to satisfy the discipline, but we are working with the communities. I teach community based research and I think that for me has been very eye opening that I have to start practicing better what I'm teaching that as someone who is doing service for a community, I need to understand the community and the community's wants and recognize that that is going to change from situation to situation to family to family. And that's not something that we like to tell our students, I don't think because we want them to have a very clear answer for everything and we want them to have a direction in what their job and work is. And I think that that is a huge disservice.

Yeah, well here, here it's the messiness and the mushiness of these kinds of real world issues where the tension between what, how things get, you know, how learning comes about, how knowledge comes about, you know, visa, the academic process, research, but then the application in these forensic kinds of settings and real, ultimately, you know, capital, real capital world kinds of situations, you know, really, you know, do strike moral and ethical chords in people that, that have moral and ethical chords as obviously you do it. It reminds me, you were also, you were on a panel, Forensic Genomics New Frontiers, New Considerations and you talked a lot about the, the, you know, the difficulties with these issues about you know, the yes, we have these cool, you know, whiz bang DNA technologies, etc. But then to bring that into the human aspect of it, of the, you know, well, what are the social implications of this? What are the, the legal and ethical which are oftentimes are not, you know, one in the same. So do you have perspectives on, on this and like what can be done as, as safeguards? Is it, does it, you know, it sounds like part of it is, you know, in the classroom but you know, do you have other thoughts about that vis a vis safeguards?

So this is an issue that's sort of emerging as paramount along the border. To make identifications we need a reference sample against which the sample of the unknown is compared. So like a DNA sample from a family member or a DNA sample from something that was biologically left over from that person. So you'll see on television they use a hairbrush or a toothbrush or those sort of things. More often than not, it's a family reference sample that we will have because genetically we can infer a match because we have enough markers that are shared in very patterned ways between the individual and their family members that's not shared with anyone else. So we would know whether or not that person is related to the people who provided the reference samples by making these inferences between the patterns that should be there in the DNA. So the issue is for undocumented persons, there are not databases that represent their family members. Right, because there's not an institutional push to have that happen. So on the one hand, we're trying to figure out how we collect these samples and where do we put them and what is safe. These are people who are again fleeing conflict, you know, political persecution, etc. So they're fleeing problems in their own country. They're coming, attempting to cross into our country where there is resistance to immigrants and these issues of detention and deportation, etc. So collecting a repository of family DNA that links identities to genetics is really, really risky. It's essential, but really risky. And I don't think there is a good solution yet as to who should hold that and how that should be protected. At what point can things be subpoenaed and used for other purposes than what one might have expected? I have a paper that I'm a co author on here at Stanford, where we were able to link an individual's CODIS markers with a series of markers collected for those big direct to consumer ancestry testing. And we were also able to do it with other family members. So it means that in having your DNA on record, whether in one form or another, in terms of a marker, which is what we use forensically to make an identification, or those big databases which are used for health and ancestry and those other phenotype biological traits, we can figure out who you are, or we can figure out who your family members are. So much in the same ways that trauma issue is inherited and passed along to subsequent generations, Our decision to take someone's DNA, or your decision to give your DNA up to 23andMe or Ancestry DNA, or all those very reputable, exciting companies that are doing really cool work, also opens up the possibility of exposure for not just you, but generations after you, because we can infer from your DNA, your family's DNA, next generation's DNA, etc. So privacy and security is not just a issue of immigrant rights, it's not just an issue of criminal justice, but it's an issue of me and my mother and father who also have their DNA in these big direct to consumer repositories. Because as a geneticist I was like, I want to test it in my lab and see what I get. And then I want them to test it in their lab and then I'm going to get every one of my friends to go do it as well without having recognized back whatever many years ago that was what we could subsequently do with it. Again, proactive instead of reactive is has to be the modern.

Wow, that's really a good point. I think about it too. There's been, I've seen discussions about, you know, use of that in biasing, prohibiting people from getting certain kinds of insurance coverages and things, even if someone's not symptomatic. And it's a probabilistic aspect of, well, you have this likelihood of getting Parkinson's disease, so you know, you're a bad candidate for being able to get insurance or we're going to jack up your insurance rates even higher. Now on the ifcom, if you ever do develop, you know, this XYZ problem because you have a polymorphism someplace. So wow, these are very broad. You know, it's sort of like you, the, the philosophical issues of the, the intersection between this kind of work, like you said, from criminal justice and, and the, the whiz bang of wow, this is kind of cool, fun technology. And then, you know, five, ten years later going, oops, you know, this is maybe something we should have tried to forecast. So I, I want to be respectful of your time. There's a few other things I'd like to just ask you about real quickly. You're also, I'd mentioned in the intro that you're an advisory board member for the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti Oppressive Praxis at Stanford Medical School. Can you share with the audience and myself what goes on in that program and what that's about?

So it's a brand new program. This is the first year and it is for graduate and postdocs in not just the medical school, but now broadly across Stanford. And the goal is to introduce students in various student stages, issues of race, identity and ethnicity and how to be sensitive to those in both research and in daily academic or clinical interactions and to sort of foreground the importance of thinking with those issues in mind. In terms of how you structure your research, how you interact within your classroom, how you design your lab to be, to build a, this time a cohort of informed students, but to hopefully give traction so that this is something that would be standard in all academic training, that it's an important component of research is to recognize the individuality of the people who we are studying. And to be a very successful and collegiate researcher is to also set up an environment in which you are respect, respecting and uplifting and supporting your students and your larger community. So it's to I think, introduce some of these issues that maybe are not talked about enough. Give students the ability to also voice their thoughts on areas of need and ways that these can be better addressed and to just think about diversity and inclusion and equity in a way that's actually tangible and actionable in an academic environment.

Wow. Well, you seem like a perfect board member for that from our conversation. What a great fit. It seems to me I gave a talk there years ago at a Stanford Medicine X conference and I have to say of all the conferences I've been to that are of like a professional, medical, healthcare related kind of thing that that was probably the most patient centric conference I had ever been to where patients were also presenting and, and they had one day where if you're a provider you would go into this area and you would be kind of role play being a patient and patient folks that, you know that were identified as patients were going to be the person treating you. And it was really sort of a nice empathy building perspective but it wasn't just some little cute thing to do. That was really throughout the fabric of the whole conference. So it seems like, you know, Stanford's really identified itself with your, obviously your perspective and what you do in the classroom and as well as this kind of a certification for postdocs and other professionals. I think that's just fantastic. How does that sort of a thing, I mean, is that sort of the ethos in general at Stanford or how has this evolved?

I think that especially with these. My current center for race and ethnicity definitely it's growing in its social justice focus and its concern for equity and diversity and racial equality. I would love to see Stanford be one of the thought leaders in doing social justice work. We do not have a social justice center and I think while we have a very thriving human rights center, social justice is same but very different. And a center for the study of race and ethnicity is also very different. And I think there's so much potential in Stanford bringing together experts in the medical school who do genetics, humanists who speak to identity and race from a social perspective, cultural anthropologists. And then having that tie into those of us who are concerned with border issues and human variation and, you know, population history, that's archaeologists and that's historians. I think it could be an amazing center that would bring together a component of the Stanford community that could really affect change. And there is nowhere, to my knowledge, really anywhere in the US that has both that focus and that expertise that could make it tractable. So I am encouraged that as the social justice work starts to infiltrate more areas of the university mindset that will have this impassioned movement towards really instant institutionalizing and validating this kind of research so that students are not just doing it as a side project with me, but that they have the ability to actually pursue this with multiple perspectives and have the rigorous theoretical training that maybe I can't provide in one quarter of an independent study and to be able to have this integrated within, like, their larger area of concentration.

That's great.

So I think there's great potential and hopefully a movement.

Yeah. Good. Well, if anyone in our audience has funding resources, then, you know, let. Let both of us know that. I think that would be fantastic. I love the concept of couching it within a center for social justice and having these kinds of things be components of it. That's great. I don't want to finish without bringing it up. When I was doing background on you, I saw that you have a new book coming out. I don't know if it's already out or when it might be out, but can you tell us about it?

Sure. I actually have two. Part one and two.

Okay. Of course you do.

Part one should be coming out hopefully by the end of this fall. They're both through El Savior, and they're on age estimation from the human skeleton. And they are bringing. The first one is an edited volume with a large chunk in the beginning by me and one of my former postdocs, June Kim, who is now a faculty member on the East Coast. And we are looking at different ways that we can estimate your age at the time at which you died from factors within your skeleton and ways that we can do this better, both computationally and from a medical legal perspective, so that it actually holds important weight in the courtroom. So we're trying to bring together the best minds in practice and in computation in the field to create the synthesis volume, which will be volume one. That is some really cool projects and opportunities for this kind of research. And then volume Two is a almost encyclopedic or textbook style synthesis of the issues and the way that we can resolve them in a practical way. So, so that we are no longer these, again, cloistered academics producing these highbrow papers that have no actual translation into real practice. So this volume is going to take those papers and what we gained in knowledge, translate them into a way that can be used in everyday medical legal practice. We're developing a interface that will allow the computations to be done that will accompany the volume. So it very much ties into my general philosophy. Let's think very academically and intellectually and then let's bring this into the realm of reality and practice. And one of the, I think, most exciting things about the paper is that it allow, or the book is that it allows in this first volume for unfettered experimentation, which I think is something that we don't do enough of. We don't decide that we're going to throw the ideas that have been long standing to the wind and we're just going to see what we find. And I think one of my papers that I'm contributing to it is I took the traditional age estimation markers and they were always believed to tell us nothing but information about age because we couldn't have a marker that had information about activity or your health or these other life history factors because then it wouldn't be consistent. Right. We need something that is in good agreement with chronology. We can track it across biological time. So at age 35, we see these particular patterns. At age 36 we see these, et cetera, et cetera, across multiple populations. So I thought, you know, genetic, our genetic traits permeate everything, right? We know that ancestry is carried in all aspects of our biology. We're seeing that increasingly more. So what, what if it just happens to also be in these traits that we always just thought were age related traits? And lo and behold, I did an analysis on it and I found that 40% of the variation in the trait that we thought was the most robust and classic of the age estimation trait is actually attributable to ancestry. Which means that from a very cool practical perspective, we can now get two kinds of information from one tiny little fragment of bone. Instead of having to have it used to always be that ancestry was estimated from measurements of the or features within the cranium. So in a forensic case where we have high fragmentation now all we need is this tiny little piece from the pelvis and we can get double the information.

Holy cow.

But if we don't yeah, we have to start thinking outside of the box and bringing what we know from other areas of research to bear on the long standing assumptions. So that's kind of the tenor of the first volume and then more applied stuff in the second.

That is fantastic.

I hope it'll be good.

Yeah, I'm sure it will be good.

The first one will be good.

Well, we'll put, I'll go to the publisher and we'll put some links in as well too. So thank you for that. I also, again, I want to be respectful of your time and I also just, I want to thank you. You have been very patient with my many naive, non informed questions. So that's, that's very generous of you and it's just, it's been such an engaging and informative conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Bridget. This is a terrific part of my day and just it gives me other, I've been taking little notes on, on my pad here of other things I want to take a look at and I'm curious about. So thank you so much for that.

I can't thank you enough for being so kind as to invite me and to allowing me to bring what I believe is critical issues to a larger audience. And that for me is so huge. So I'm so grateful.

Absolutely. So I'm going to put a variety of things in the show notes. I do want to get that website that you're talking about too that your students are developing. So shoot that off to me whenever you have a chance and I'll get them all put together. But if the listeners want to learn more about you, learn more about your work, learn more about the center, what are some of the best ways for them to follow you or connect with you or get a hold of some

of your reprints of course, so they can go straight to Stanford to the center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and I have a webpage there. I also am on LinkedIn and on Facebook of course given my now secondary role, it's brought me great perspective. Same but different. So I feel like I'm coming back now with new fresh thoughts. So and I on the website that I will also give you the, the link to has will have a way to get in touch with me as well. Please, if there's at any point I can be of assistance, I am more than happy to consult. This is, this is why I do what I do. So I'm delighted to talk about research to students who are interested in this, speaking with attorneys who need assistance. So please, anyone reach out. I'm always available.

Very good. Thank you. Yeah. Again, just to the, you know, the respect that I have for you from your scientific academic side and then just the, you know, heartfelt appreciation for bringing that into play with social justice and with the humanitarian bent. I mean, you're a, I think, a wonderful role model for activists as well as academics. So it's been a pleasure to have you on the show and great to count on you as a very good friend. So thanks so much for your time, Bridget, today. It's very generous and keep up the great work.

Thanks, Chris.

Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot, LLC. Assistant Producer, Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien Executive Producer and Host, Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks. And until next time,