20. Did Grandmothers Enhance Reproductive Success in Historic Populations?

Alla Chernenko is a graduate of the University of Utah (Ph.D., Sociology) and currently works for the State of Utah.

Martin Dribe is professor of economic history and the director of the Centre for Economic Demography at Lund University. He is the principal investigator of the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database, and led the research program The Rise and Fall of the Industrial City: The Landskrona Population Study (2016-2023). Dribe’s research focuses on historical and contemporary economic demography covering mortality, fertility, migration, marriage, and social mobility. His work has been published in the leading journals of demography and economic history.

Sacha C. Engelhardt is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociobiology/Anthropology at the University of Göttingen. He is an evolutionary behavioural ecologist who focuses on the study of the mechanisms, fitness and evolution of cooperation in humans and non-human animals.

Alain Gagnon is a professor of demography at the Université de Montréal. His researches focus on epidemics and pandemics of influenza, as well as on migration and health. His research also addresses the role of early life conditions on mortality and longevity, and pays particular attention to the evolutionary implications of demographic behavior in general.

Heidi Hanson is the Group Lead of the Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics Group in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her research has utilized data science and large, multimodal population level datasets to: 1) investigate temporal patterns in cancer risk and aging; 2) explore familial clustering of disease; 3) examine environmental determinants of health; 4) extract phenotypic information from population scale electronic health records; 5) develop new techniques to investigate the relationship between the environment and health; and 6) develop new methods for identifying patterns of multi-phenotype clustering in families. Her research emphases include understanding how genetic and environmental influences throughout the life course affect disease risk, population health, and the health of future generations.

Huong Meeks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, a life course epidemiologist and demographer with special expertise in population health and longitudinal data, familial and survival analysis. Her research interests focus on the longitudinal effects of family, individual, and neighborhood socioeconomic status, and other social determinants of health on adverse health outcomes in pediatric critical care context. Her current goal is to create a longitudinal database linking measures of neighborhood characteristics, including small-area measures of built-environment trajectories, and family characteristics, including social support network to comprehensive familial and medical records that depict the relationship between social determinants of health on outcomes of pediatric patients with chronic conditions and their families.

Luciana Quaranta is Associate Professor at the Department of Economic History and the Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University. Her research focuses on historical demography and examines period and early-life determinants of living standards, health, and wellbeing using detailed micro-level data.

Ken R. Smith is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Family Studies and Population Science at the University of Utah. He is a biodemographer who focused on aging over the life course, the interplay between fertility and exceptional longevity, familiality of demographic traits, and the intra- and intergenerational effects of adversity in early life on later-life outcomes. He has also worked to develop the Utah Population Database to promote research on historical demography and biodemography.

Hélène Vézina holds a Ph.D. in demography from the Université de Montréal. She is Full Professor in the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and director of the BALSAC project. Her research program rests on the use of the genealogical and family data found in the BALSAC database and touches on issues of historical demography and population genetics in a multidisciplinary context. She has worked extensively on the genetic and genealogical diversity of Quebec regional populations and on the demohistorical factors that have shaped this diversity.