Faculty Profiles
Sociologist’s Interdisciplinary Focus Results in Diverse Research Grants
Professor Doug Anderton (sociology), who is also Associate Dean for Research Affairs in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and director of SADRI, the Social and Demographic Research Institute on campus, works on many projects with very different connections: 19th century disease and death, nanotechnology, environmental justice, breast cancer and more. “What unites them all in my framework,” Anderton says, “is social demography and the interaction of populations, organization, environment and technology: a classic demographic focus on interdisciplinarity called the POET scheme, or sometimes Duncan’s Diamond. This simple framework emphasizes what we all should know: any real social science has to cut across disciplines to reflect complex realities. The most common mistake of social analysis or model building is to place unrealistic and artificial boundaries on social science.”
Anderton’s first “real” job after getting an MS in economics in 1975 was as a senior statistician for the Utah State Department of Health. “That job led me back to grad school to study demography,” he says. To earn his keep while working on his PhD (completed in 1983), Anderton worked on a project in human genetics. “It focused on breast cancer, researching the historical family structure of an at-risk population. Today, after many years of conducting historical population research, I have returned in a part of my work to the genetic/breast cancer focus with Kathleen Arcaro, associate professor of environmental toxicology in the School of Veterinary and Animal Sciences on campus.”
Another influence on Anderton’s work came from a chance encounter with Ed Calabrese in the School of Public Health on a project examining environmental justice. That has led to his interest in pollutants and their health effects, and actually paved the way to Arcaro and the breast cancer work.
About five years ago, the Environmental Institute brought Anderton, as an environmental justice representative, together with a group of chemists and life scientists to discuss potential collaborations with social scientists. “My big concern,” Anderton reminisces, “was the very indirect use of geographic proximity to hazards as a measure of risk and the lack of measures of demonstrable harm. I saw Kathleen’s work on the toxicology of breast milk and sera as a further real measure of harm that might be tied to specific hazards and geography as well as a variety of hazards that could tie to broader social variables like class, race, culture, consumerism, subcultures and so on. She was looking for some social/health relation to her scientific analysis of breast milk. So that’s how we came together. Seldom have I had such a great collaborator or a more intellectually engaging journey.” To date their research has been funded by three grants.
Last year funds from the Avon Foundation for $120,000 allowed Anderton and Arcaro to support and develop biological baseline measures of methylation (damage by age, fertility, family health history, behavior, etc.) and improve techniques for sample collections, including refining and expanding the social questionnaire, which is a continual growth process.
A new $82,000 grant from the National Science Foundation/Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing has them working with chemists and the nanotechnology center on campus to develop ways of measuring nanoparticles. “We are interested specifically in TiO2—titanium oxide, which is in about everything people use nowadays—in our breast milk samples. Although industry tells us that TiO2 in sunscreens, cosmetics, and so on are safe, no organizational responsibility exists for ensuring this. In fact, at this point nobody can even distinguish TiO2 in the body, even though a variety of studies point specifically to TiO2 delivering carcinogens. We think we have a way, using an electron microscope, to give us a measure of this potential toxin in breast milk.”
A larger Department of Defense grant for $485,000 is a further outgrowth of this work. “We began to believe that we had evidence that the methylation we were seeing was a reasonable diagnostic for potential breast cancer. Using the Avon sample as a baseline, we collect biopsy samples from women across the country. All the lab work is done in Kathleen’s shop, the long-distance sample collection methods have been perfected, and all the statistical analysis is done in SADRI.”
Anderton, who is editor of Social Science History, is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, known for pushing careful methodology and critical evaluation of demographic methods. Most notable was his discovery that the Princeton European Fertility Project had employed methods that virtually guaranteed their results and that they had neglected a great deal of informal fertility control through the spacing of birth—the so-called innovation-adaptation of fertility control debate.
Anderton’s work in environmental justice, which was featured in the Boston Globe, was named one of the ten best environmental justice studies by the GAO. It pointed out that environmental justice was more often a matter of how cities segregate the poor than a targeting of minority communities.
Another grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development funded an interdisciplinary study known as “The Grammars of Death.” Featured in the New York Times, it sought to better understand the later nineteenth-century mortality plateau and eventual mortality transition in the United States through a formal semantic analysis of literal causes of death in the Connecticut River Valley mill towns of Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts, between 1850 and 1912.
As Associate Dean for Research Affairs, Anderton helps other faculty with research difficulties and grant questions, arranges collaborations, represents the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences in research meetings, helps the dean evaluate research possibilities, and so on. As director of SADRI, he works with research staff and projects, writes grants, articles and books, and makes sure data is collected, entered and analyzed. And as a professor, Anderton loves to teach (especially population studies), but these days he barely has the time to teach graduate statistics. “I’m planning to teach more in the future, though,” he says, “because, really, that’s what I like the most.”
August 18, 2008
