Undergraduate Public Health Student receives Baylor URSA Research grant
Kate Pogue, Baylor University class of ’25, is currently double majoring in Public Health and Statistics. her goals are to pursue a PhD in Biostatistics and career researching food and water insecurity and poverty.
Can you provide an overview of the URSA grant you received?
My research project is titled “Machine learning applied to diet trends and adiposity in an Indigenous Amazonian population experiencing market integration.” I am working on this project in the Human Evolutionary Biology and Health Lab here at Baylor, under the direction of Dr. Sam Urlacher and mentorship of PhD candidate Marcela Pfaff-Nash. In this project, I’ve gotten to conduct a deep statistical analysis of a large nutrition dataset collected among an Indigenous Amazonian group called the Shuar, who comprise many communities in southeastern Ecuador. Quite a few Shuar communities are undergoing a transition called Market Integration, which is the process of a community depending more and more on a market-based economy for their way of life. As part of a research collaboration called the Shuar Health and Life History Project, about 850 households in 15 Shuar communities participated in a food frequency questionnaire during a 9-year period, and I am focusing on that food frequency questionnaire data in my project. In a statistical software called R, I am developing an “R package” to take the reported foods from the questionnaire and produce an estimate of daily nutrient intake for each participant. More importantly, this package will be “open source” once published and will hopefully help researchers in the future to analyze similar data quickly and easily. There have been so many cool findings in this analysis, but one of the most significant was the stark nutritional differences between regions with high and low levels of Market Integration. There were not only large differences in types of food consumed, but differences in specific nutrient adequacy that make a lot of sense in terms of the health needs we typically see in more market integrated communities. I am employing a few Machine Learning techniques in this analysis and my next step in analysis is to look for associations with certain nutrition indicators and child growth.
What inspired you pursue this research topic?
I love studying this research topic because it lies at the intersection of just about every class I’ve taken here at Baylor: Statistics, Global Health, Nutrition, Public Health, Math, and more. Studying Statistics at Baylor has opened my eyes to the power of robust data practices for discovering new things in any discipline. Especially in the realm of Global Health, which is often looked at through the lens of social sciences, I’ve learned that employing robust statistical and machine learning methods to quantify phenomena like social determinants of health adds so much value to Public Health research and interventions. Though my project is far from a “big data” analysis, I hope in future years to be working at the intersection of big data and epidemiology so that we can objectively identify root causes of health inequalities and fund effective interventions for improving the lives of us all.
What have you learned from this experience?
This experience has taught me so much! Coding can be tedious at times, but it pays off when you finally get that correct model or plot or transformation. I’ve gotten to share my work at a few conferences including the National Collegiate Research Conference at Harvard, which was a hugely growing experience for me. I was so nervous going to a National conference for the first time, but quickly realized that my statistics background gave me at least one way to relate to most of the research I learned about!
How did this research contribute to reaching your personal and professional goals?
In the future I’m hoping to pursue a PhD in Biostatistics or Epidemiology. This project has definitely confirmed my desire to study more Statistics simply for the sake of studying it! But aside from all the math, my true passion lies in ensuring health equity in this country and I hope to put what I’ve learned to use in the Public Health Sphere via the government, academia, or an NGO.
What advice would you give to fellow students about pursuing a research grant?
My advice to undergraduates pursuing an URSA grant is the same thing a professor told me: the only way to 100% ensure you don’t receive it is by not applying. So, apply! Something I’m learning even as a student is that failure and rejection are almost always part of the biggest successes. It is better to try for unsure opportunities than to not try at all!
Is there anything else you would like to share about the research grant or experience?
I’d like to thank URSA for providing me with the opportunity and funds to conduct this project! I deeply appreciate Baylor’s willingness to fund research even at the Undergraduate level. Thank you!