Environmental inequities and maternal health and behaviour: Building bridges from UK-based research to research in low- and middle-income countries

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Guided by the evolutionary framework of life history theory, which predicts lower parental investment in lower-quality environments, Laura's PhD research explored socioeconomic differentials in breastfeeding behaviour in the UK with a particular focus on local environmental quality. Laura used advanced statistical techniques to analyse associations between various sociocultural and physical environmental exposures (e.g. feelings of safety, air pollution, and passive smoke and water disinfectant by-products) and mothers' chances of initiating and maintaining breastfeeding. Laura's first PhD Paper investigated subjective and objective measures of local environmental quality in the nationally-representative Millennium Cohort Study and found the latter was more robustly associated with both breastfeeding initiation and duration and higher SES protected the breastfeeding chances of mothers with more resources, even in low-quality environments. Paper 2 focused on physical environmental quality in the Born in Bradford Study. Whilst individual SES positively predicted breastfeeding, physical measures of environmental quality showed inconsistent associations, with for example water chemicals predicting reduced chances of initiating breastfeeding amongst Pakistani-origin mothers but air pollution predicting reduced hazards of stopping breastfeeding amongst White UK-born mothers. Paper 3 analysed data from both cohorts to situate breastfeeding within a wider suite of parenting, reproductive and health behaviours and found limited clustering of traits both within and between these domains although White UK-born mothers showed more clustering than Pakistani-origin mothers. Laura's PhD research adds to the developing field of evolutionary public health and her findings contribute to the theoretical debate as to whether parental investment forms part of a life-history strategy and have implications for environmental and infant feeding policy.During her fellowship year at LSE, Laura will be transitioning from UK-based research to developing grants for projects focusing on LMICs. With a growing interest in environmental injustice, Laura is keen to conduct research in communities impacted by natural disasters and the environmental adversity brought about by the behaviour of others; she is particularly interested in working in Latin America and specifically Peru due to its high level of air pollution and vulnerability to climate change events such as the El Niño South Oscillation.Whilst some of the fellowship time is allocated to new research, during which Laura will be analysing environmental links with breastfeeding in another UK dataset, the ESRC fellowship scheme will also importantly give Laura the time and skills required to develop strong grant proposals for future research projects in the Latin American context. Laura will be expanding her knowledge on environmental and health issues particularly pertinent to Latin America. As part of her fellowship she will be undertaking training in environmental justice, air quality monitoring, creative research methods and Spanish. Laura will also be increasing the impact of her PhD research by presenting at conferences and organising a workshop on environmental effects on women's health.