Research Campus Scientist Targets African-American Health Issues
A newly hired scientist at the N.C. Research Campus is working to better understand health risks of African-Americans based on their genes and DNA. Dr. Fatimah L.C. Jackson, a prominent anthropologist, has joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Nutrition Research Institute.
In Kannapolis, Jackson will continue developing a tool called “ethnogenetic layering,” used to better understand how different populations are susceptible to disease. Using this tool, she said she hopes to identify immediate and individual intervention strategies to address health disparities among African-Americans.
Jackson has worked among diverse African and African-American groups in Liberia, Cameroon, Egypt, Sudan, Tanzania and Rwanda. According to Jackson, most researchers have approached the African-American community as a monolith, treating a diverse population as if it were uniform and then inadvertently selecting a subset to represent all African-Americans.
In fact, she said in a press release, African-Americans are derived from diverse areas of West and West Central Africa. Differing proportions of Africans from these regions were transported to America during the transatlantic slave trade.
