The Manus Lab asks: how do early life environments become biologically embedded to shape human health? To answer this question, we leverage the microbiome as a system that is environmentally sensitive, shared across generations, and predictive of health outcomes. Our lab is particularly interested in the social transmission of microbes as a pathway through which early life environments “get under the skin” to shape health phenotypes. The lab’s interdisciplinary approach combines community-engaged fieldwork, multi-omics laboratory methods, and bioinformatics to generate new data that informs theories in human biology, biological anthropology, and evolutionary medicine.
We are in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), and are affiliated with the Institute for Health Disparities Research and the School of Data Science. Our lab is recruiting graduate students (PhD and MA). Please send an email (see below) if you are interested in learning more.
Dr. Manus is an Assistant Professor at UTSA. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University and an MSc in Global Health from Duke University. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the THRiVE Discovery Lab at the University of Manitoba. She has conducted field-based research with communities in South Africa, Madagascar, Mexico, and the USA.
Let’s get in touch!
Email: melissa.manus@utsa.edu
Melissa B. Manus, PhD, MSc 