From drought to discovery: WMU researchers team up to understand climate change resilience

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—From the drought-scorched plains of northern Kenya to the statistics labs at Western Michigan University, Dr. Bilinda Straight and Dr. Duy Ngo are joining forces to investigate how environmental stressors can affect human adaptation and climate change resilience.   

Climate Stress in Northern Kenya 

Straight, professor of anthropology, has worked and conducted research with the Samburu people, a pastoralist community in Northern Kenya since the early 1990s. In 2009, while doing fieldwork for a different project she found herself amidst one of the worst droughts on record.   

“I personally was on the ground witnessing its impact on people I knew and their livestock,” Straight recalls. “There were carcasses literally littering the roadsides for miles, going up to water points.”   

Fast forward to 2017, Straight decided to revisit the drought, intrigued by its long-term effects. As climate change is expected to have a major impact on human health, especially for climate-reliant communities, like pastoralists, research has become more urgent and essential than ever.   

“I thought that it would make sense to go back and look at the impacts of drought, starting in utero,” she says. “What could be the impacts of drought on children, on their health, on their growth, and developmentally?”  

Enlisting the help of Dr. Belinda Needham, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, they identified the need for sibling pairs in the research design and secured a National Science Foundation grant.  By comparing siblings whose mothers were in their first trimester during the record-breaking drought to those conceived after, the study explores how such environmental stressors, including those induced by climate change, influence long-term developmental outcomes.   

Collecting this data was no small feat: “It’s a needle in a haystack,” she says. “These are dispersed settlements; people live really far apart. It was a bit of a nightmare from the standpoint of rugged roads and all the terrain you had to cover.”  

Nevertheless, Straight and her team persisted, collecting extensive yet precise data. Alongside standard demographics, they collected detailed epigenetic, meteorological and climate data, while conducting in-depth interviews with mothers. These interviews explored the trauma, emotional challenges and psychosocial vulnerabilities mothers may have experienced during pregnancy.   

Applying cutting-edge statistics to climate change research 

With over three years of fieldwork, hours of interviews and "big data” for epigenetic analysis that included more than 850,000 DNA regions for each person, it was going to take an expert in statistics to comb through the data. Dr. Duy Ngo, assistant professor of statistics, was the man for the job.  

“Bilinda contacted me about the data, and I really liked the project, it’s related to climate change,” Ngo says. “It’s kind of a challenge for me, because I haven’t been working in climate change and especially DNA information.”  

Straight emphasizes the crucial role Ngo plays in the project: “I can run the growth analyses, I can run really basic statistical analyses, but Ngo has been the person without whom we would not have the epigenetic analyses."

Ngo introduced cutting-edge statistical methods to the project, applying a Bayesian approach to the high-dimensional dataset. Unlike classical statistical methods, this method incorporates prior belief, knowledge and context into the analysis, making it ideal for such a multi-dimensional dataset that takes multiple forms of data, and where context is crucial.   

Ngo’s statistical genius compliments Straight’s deep understanding of the anthropological side of the data, creating a powerful synergy for tackling the broad and complex dataset.  Navigating through hundreds of thousands of data points is challenging, and having an expert like Straight who understands its context is invaluable, Ngo notes.   

Straight jokes, “You can see how we’re collaboratively married.”  

The team has already discovered striking epigenetic growth differences when comparing sibling pairs exposed to drought. They identified differentially methylated sites, which reflect how environmental factors like drought can alter gene expression, highlighting the crucial role the epigenetic analysis plays in climate change research.   

Mentoring the next generation 

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Ngo is now mentoring students to analyze and publish findings from Straight’s dataset.   

The first student to work with the data was Xi Qiao, a Ph.D. statistics student. Her dissertation was on a new Bayesian causal mediation analysis methodology for complex and high-dimensional DNA methylation data. Qiao illustrated how this method could be used in the project to understand how climate change in mothers affects their children’s growth outcomes through DNA methylation sites.  The results were reported in a paper in the "Journal of Applied Statistics," where Qiao is the first author. 

Qiao was also the first author of a paper that examined the effects of heat in utero, published in "Nature Communications" in Spring 2024. Her findings linked severe drought to epigenetic age acceleration, meaning that they experienced accelerated biological aging, potentially increasing their risk for health issues and shortened lifespans later in life.  

“She not only trained to do statistics but also trained to learn how to interpret statistics in the context of problems,” Ngo says.   

Now, Ngo is mentoring a new wave of students, both undergraduate and graduate, to do the very same thing, taking them from foundational statistical mastery to more complex analysis. Then, in collaboration with Straight, the team will guide them in the data interpretation while connecting it to the broader context of climate change resilience and adaptation.   

For Straight and Ngo, there’s no slowing down anytime soon. The team hopes to follow up on the children studied from their fieldwork, continuing the conversation on the biological effects of environmental stressors and climate change.  

“We want to get longitudinal data and keep following these kids,” she says. “We have additional questions going out, but it’s really about resilience.”   

She adds, “What happens over time? Does it set them up for being more adaptive to heat and drought events? Does it make them less so?”  

Understanding this will be crucial, not just for these communities, but for the future of climate change resilience worldwide.   

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