Samuel Urlacher
Baylor University, TX·Social Science
Children burn about 50% more calories per day than adults, relative to body size. That high energy use may come at a hidden cost.
- Fields
Social Science
Physiology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
oxidative stress
free radicals
antioxidants
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Measure total energy expenditure in children aged 3–10 using doubly labeled water, a method that tracks harmless isotope-tagged water to calculate daily calorie use.
- Quantify oxidative stress in the same children with an oxidative stress index that weighs urinary 8-OHdG, a DNA damage marker, against antioxidant activity.
- Test how children's daily energy expenditure relates to oxidative stress as a life history trade-off, adding household food and nutrition data to the bioassay results.
More about the research
Burning energy produces free radicals, reactive molecules that can damage cells. When free radicals outpace the body's antioxidant defenses, the result is oxidative stress, which is linked to chronic disease and higher mortality. Antioxidant defenses also cost energy, and in childhood that energy could otherwise go to growth. This doctoral dissertation project asks how children balance these demands. It frames the question as a life history trade-off: competing uses of a limited energy budget.
Why it matters
Learning how energy use links to cellular damage in childhood could guide public health priorities and disease prevention. Families and child health programs could gain clearer insight into how energy demands, nutrition and antioxidant defenses interact during growth. This could matter for preventing chronic conditions tied to oxidative stress.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Scott Crouter
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Develop and validate machine learning models that use both accelerometer and gyroscope data to classify activity type and estimate energy expenditure, tested against a 24-hour room calorimetry stay and portable calorimetry in adults.
Theresa Gildner
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Social Science
Build a neighborhood-level dataset linking flood frequency, pathogens in water and soil, resident experiences and gastrointestinal infection rates in flood-prone U.S. communities.
Mohammad Alfrad Nobel Bhuiyan
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-Shreveport, LA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Calculate oxidative balance scores for 101,316 National Center for Health Statistics participants and relate them to plasma volatile organic compound levels in people with and without substance use disorder and cardiovascular disease.
The school
Baylor University: 5 labs on PI Pages, $135M a year on research, 280 research doctorates a year.
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