Thomas McDade

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Weinberg College Board of Visitors Research and Teaching Professor
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Department of Anthropology, Emory University, 1999
t-mcdade@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Thom McDade is a biological anthropologist who conducts research on health and human development in relation to social and cultural contexts and processes. Much of this work focuses on the health impact of psychosocial stress, and the integration of biological measures into population-based, social science research. He is director of the Laboratory for Human Biology Research, and associate director of Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health.

McDade's work has appeared in a wide range of journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Science and Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Demography, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, American Journal of Human Biology, Medical Anthropology, and Psychosomatic Medicine. In 2002, he received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the nation's highest honor for scientists early in their career. PECASE awardees are drawn from those who have already received prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grants from the National Science Foundation.

Current Research

Social influences on biomarkers of stress in early adulthood. McDade has helped integrate biomarker data collection into Wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), and a recent RO1 award from NIH is supporting the analysis of data from this ongoing longitudinal survey. With colleagues in IPR/C2S, McDade is investigating social status, neighborhood factors, and social relationships as sources of stress that affect mental and physical health in young adults in the U.S. This is the largest ever study of stress to include objective indicators of physiological function and health (N~20,000), and findings from this research will greatly advance our understanding of how social contexts "get under the skin" to affect health in young adults.  

Long term effects of early environments on adult health. Do circumstances early in life—in utero, infancy, early childhood—shape health later in life? This is the central question of the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS), which enrolled pregnant mothers in the Philippines over twenty years ago and has followed them and their offspring up ever since. McDade is a co-investigator for CLHNS, with primary responsibility for overseeing the analysis of plasma and saliva samples for biomarkers of endocrine and immune function.   He is currently investigating the regulation of inflammation from a developmental, life course perspective.

Acculturation, Health, and the Ecology of Immune Function in Lowland Bolivia. With colleagues in anthropology, McDade is investigating the impact of social, economic, and cultural transitions on child and adolescent health in a remote population in lowland Bolivia. This project is addressing the local impact of globalization, and is developing new, minimally-invasive methods for measuring biomarkers of health.

Biomarkers for Population-Based Health Research. The application of minimally-invasive, "field-friendly" methods for measuring physiology is an important part of McDade's effort to conduct integrative population-based research on health. He has developed methods for assaying biomarkers in a drop of blood collected from a simple finger prick, and is currently consulting on the implementation of these methods into a number of large, nationally representative health surveys, including the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the Health and Retirement Survey, and the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project.

Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health. Social and cultural contexts are critical determinants of human development and health, but we know very little about the processes or pathways through which they act. Along with colleagues at IPR, McDade has helped establish C2S as a new center at Northwestern to serve as catalyst for innovative, multidisciplinary approaches to understanding health disparities. C2S has recently been awarded a R24 Population Research Infrastructure grant from NICHD, and McDade will be working with colleagues over the next four years to develop C2S into a full-fledged population center.

Selected Publications

McDade, T.W., J. N. Rutherford, L. Adair, and C. Kuzawa. 2009. Population differences in associations between C-reactive protein concentration and adiposity: comparison of young adults in the Philippines and the United States. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 89: 1237-45.

McDade, T.W., J. N. Rutherford, L. Adair, and C. Kuzawa. 2008. Adiposity and pathogen exposure predict C-reactive protein concentration in Filipino women. Journal of Nutrition 138: 2442-47.

McDade, T.W., Williams, S., and J.J. Snodgrass. 2007. What a drop can do: Dried blood spots as a minimally-invasive method for integrating biomarkers into population-based research. Demography 44: 899-925.

McDade, T.W., Reyes-García, V., Blackinton, P., Tanner, S., Huanca, T, and W.R. Leonard.   2007.   Maternal ethnobotanical knowledge is associated with multiple measures of child health in the Bolivian Amazon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 6134-6139.

McDade, T. W., L. C. Hawkley, and J. T. Cacioppo. 2006. Psychosocial and behavioral predictors of inflammation in middle-age and older adults: The Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study. Psychosomatic Medicine 68: 376-81.

McDade, T. W. and C. M. Worthman 2004. Socialization ambiguity in Samoan adolescents: A new model for research in human development and stress in the context of culture change. Journal of Research in Adolescence 14:49-72.

McDade, T. W., J. Burhop, and J. Dohnal. 2004. High sensitivity enzyme immunoassay for C-reactive protein in dried blood spots. Clinical Chemistry 50:652-54.

McDade, T. W. 2003. Life history theory and the immune system: Steps toward a human ecological immunology. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 4:100-25.

McDade, T. W. 2003. Life event stress and immune function in Samoan adolescents: Toward a cross-cultural psychoneuroimmunology. In Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems: Contextualizing Psychoneuroimmunology, Embodying the Social Sciences, ed. J. Wilce, 170-88. New York: Routledge.

McDade, T.W. 2002. Status incongruity in Samoan youth: A biocultural analysis of culture change, stress, and immune function. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16:123-50.

McDade, T. W., M. A. Beck, C. Kuzawa, and L. S. Adair. 2001. Prenatal undernutrition, postnatal environments, and antibody response to vaccination in adolescence. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 74:543-548.

McDade, T. W. and L. S. Adair. 2001. Defining the "urban" in urbanization and health: A factor analysis approach. Social Science and Medicine 53:55-70.

McDade, T. W., J. F. Stallings, A. Angold, E. J. Costello, M. Burleson, J. T. Cacioppo, R. Glaser, and C. M. Worthman. Epstein-Barr virus antibodies in whole blood spots: A minimally-invasive method for assessing an aspect of cell-mediated immunity. Psychosomatic Medicine 62:560-68.