Pascal Gagneux

This message reflects the views of the Anthropology Chair, Pascal Gagneux, only.

Welcome to the Anthropology Department of UC San Diego. Our department takes diverse approaches to studying humans. These range from investigating our species' evolution, deep prehistory and more recent history, how we communicate, develop and function as individuals, groups and societies, to how we experience health and disease. The department consists of four subfields: archaeological, biological, psychological, and sociocultural/linguistic anthropology. 

There is much to be discovered about us humans. How did we become the global species we now are? How did we become self-aware, aware of our mortality, capable of extreme optimism or pessimism, capable of endless imagination, and possessing the combined capacity for highly pro-social acts and worst atrocities? Humans how directly shape the earth's biosphere and climate. Our species has existed for over 200,000 years, is one of ~500 primates, and one of over 6,000 mammalian species. It took humans over 200,000 years to reach a population of one billion, but less than 200 years to reach eight billion, with half of us now living in cities. 

Sociocultural anthropology investigates contemporary societies and human experiences in a time of major global challenges. These include climate change and the sixth mass extinction event on this planet, both directly caused by humans, as well as persistent inequity, injustice, and violent conflicts at both global and regional scales. Sociocultural anthropology examines the ways groups of humans organize their societies, create and contest their practical systems of meaning, and mix remarkable forms of cooperation and competition in their orchestration of life on the planet. Linguistic anthropology examines what language can tell us about power and inequality in the contemporary world. It explores avenues toward change and social justice that language can help open. Insights into how people make their material and meaningful worlds, even as these real systems and logics have a way of deeply and unevenly shaping their authors, are key to better understanding humanity. 

Archaeological anthropology explores the deep histories of these social structures. It probes these by looking for physical evidence of past societies while also drawing on written and oral histories. Archaeological anthropology relies on remote sensing, digital technology, and material science for the dating and characterization of human artefacts and biological remains to reconstruct past societies, their livelihoods, and the climate and ecosystems in which they existed. A better understanding of how past societies thrived and failed has great value for guiding efforts to improve current societies and addressing the great challenges of today. 

Psychological anthroopology examines the individual person in social and cultural contexts. This includes developmental approaches to the socialization of children and adolescents and their continuation over the course of life, psychoanalytic approaches that consider subconscious conflicts at personal and collective levels, cognitive approaches that study thought processes across cultures, and phenomenological approaches to self, emotion, and identity in lived experience. The point of intersection between psychological and medical anthropology is the understanding of cross-cultural differences and similaries in how mental illness is manifested, experienced, and treated. Medical anthropology explores human health and disease across time and space, comparing healthcare systems and the interaction of healing forms in practice. Thanks to technology, humans today have an average life expectancy that is twice that of what it was just 100 years ago. In other words, we each are benefitting from an extra "life." However, life expectancy differs by over 20 years between countries and by over 10 years across different populations in the United States. Access to and quality of healthcare still differ dramatically depending on where a person lives and how they are situated within their local society. We humans also directly contribute to health and disease by how we treat each other and by the social, political, and economic structures that we inherit, maintain, or change. All human societies have rich and diverse traditions of healing, which now coexist and/or clash with the global spread of western medical practices. 

Biological anthropology views individual humans as the temporary molecular assemblages they are. We are highly concentrated plant matter, given that we either eat plants directly or eat animals that have fed on plants. Humans embody the landscapes they inhabit via the food they consume during their lives. Unlike all other animals, humans develop, live, reproduce, and die in a pervasive sociocultural environment. This landscape of ideas, norms, shared meanings and social structures in turn exerts profound influence on human biology and the countless species that humans have domesticated. Biological anthropology examines how humans have evolved from a small-brained, bipedal ape roaming the savannahs of Africa to become the "planet-altering ape." It investigates how humans develop and how such development can be affected by our genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors (both biotic and social). Particular interests of our department are human neuronal development and the molecular underpinnings of human health and disease.

Our faculty and students combine a wide range of interests, situated along the vast span of entities—ranging from global phenomena to local societies, their material cultures and social norms, to groups and individuals, their ideas and beliefs, to the cells and molecules underlying life. Our research and teaching are crucially supported by our dedicated staff. I hope that you will find our work fascinating and worth exploring.

Dr. Pascal Gagneux is an evolutionary biologist interested in the evolution of primate molecular diversity. He is interested in the molecular interactions between cells and organisms in the context of reproduction, development, and infection. He focuses on molecules found at the outermost layer of all vertebrate cells, sugars called sialic acids, and the proteins that specifically recognize molecular patterns at the molecular frontier of cells, the glycocalyx (sugar coat). Humans have undergone a "watershed event" in their sialic acid biology since our ancestors lost the function of an important sialic acid modifying gene over two million years ago. This change has numerous consequences for human biology by virtue of having altered our "molecular self." Human innate immunity has had to adapt to this change in order to maintain efficient perception of "self," but so have countless rapidly evolving human-specific pathogens and parasites. Dr. Gagneux's research explores how distinctly human sialic acid biology is involved in several human phenomena, ranging from fertility, innate immunity and infection, to aging and maintenance of cognitive ability. 

Dr. Pascal Gagneux is the Executive Co-Director of the Center of Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) at UC San Diego, In that capacity, Dr. Gagneux also runs the Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny, a unique transdisciplinary graduate specialization for Ph.D students from eight UC San Diego graduate programs, including Anthropology.