Rate My Professor Andrea Wiley

Wiley employs biocultural and evolutionary perspectives to study human diet, nutrition, health, demography, and social behavior. Her research explores biological normalcy—the relationship between population biology and cultural ideas of normal human variation—and its implications for health and well-being. She investigates milk consumption's biological effects on child growth, menarche, insulin-like growth factor I, and life history parameters in the United States and India. Earlier work examined maternal-infant health, infant mortality, and attachment in high-altitude Himalayan populations, considering ecological, historical, and socio-cultural influences. Key publications include the textbook Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Perspective (4th edition, Oxford University Press, 2021, co-authored with John S. Allen); Cultures of Milk: The Biology and Culture of Dairy Consumption in India and the United States (Harvard University Press, 2014); Re-imagining Milk (2nd edition, Routledge, 2016); An Ecology of High-Altitude Infancy: A Biocultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2004); "Biological Normalcy" (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2023); and the Pearl Lecture "Biological Normalcy: A new framework for biocultural analysis of human population variation" (American Journal of Human Biology, 2021). Her work has shaped nutritional anthropology and biocultural theory.