Over the past five decades, the HBA has witnessed the emergence of new research strategies, methods, and technologies that have re-framed our understanding of human evolutionary biology. This session focuses on what new methods, research questions, and technologies might be “Over the Horizon” during the next fifty years.

Over the past five decades, the HBA has witnessed the emergence of new research strategies, methods, and technologies that have re-framed our understanding of human evolutionary biology. This session focuses on what new methods, research questions, and technologies might be “Over the Horizon” during the next fifty years.

Over the past five decades, the HBA has witnessed the emergence of new research strategies, methods, and technologies that have re-framed our understanding of human evolutionary biology. This session focuses on what new methods, research questions, and technologies might be “Over the Horizon” during the next fifty years.

The purpose of this memorial symposium is to honor the legacy of Roy J. Shephard, a leader in the fields of exercise science and human biology, who passed away on February 28, 2023. This symposium is particularly appropriate for the 50th anniversary meeting, as the International Biological Programme, for which Dr. Shephard was a key researcher, made several seminal contributions to the field of human biology over its history. Throughout his career, Dr. Shephard integrated medicine, exercise and environmental physiology, and human biology to advance our understanding of human variability and population health. Attendees of the symposium will learn the role that Dr. Shephard played in human biology research at high latitudes and will learn about several current research programs in circumpolar health that are legacies of the early work of Dr. Shephard.

The MENA region has been going through turmoil of war and conflict in the past decades. People of the MENA region have been living waves of revolutions, oppression, genocide and apartheid in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Jordan has been a haven for refugees from all these countries. There have been recent efforts in the past few years to understand the refugee experience from a local perspective to ensure ownership and authenticity of the local population and to work towards policies and regulations that will create better conditions and opportunities for refugees and their host communities. In this session we will share recent novel research that strives to understand the local perspective and to understand the underlying biology of behaviors in this unique population. This will help in decolonizing science and research as well as understanding the biological mechanisms of disease that will serve humanity as a whole. The session will present Fuzzy cognitive mapping as an innovative research methodology to understand the authentic perceptions of various behaviors such as agency among Syrian refugee females compared to Jordanians. Immune markers and hormones among adolescent female refugees and their correlations with trauma, epigenetic changes in adolescence Syrian refugees and intergenerational epigenetics signature of trauma in multigenerational of Syrians exposed to violence as well as looking at a comprehensive metabolome among Syrian refugees to discover predictive patterns of mental health challenges as a result of trauma. In addition to showing how lifestyle differences (rural versus urban) impact physiology at the molecular level among Amazigh populations in North Africa. Lastly, research around the impact of therapeutic fasting on Type 2 Diabetes progression in animal models stemming from human experiences and practices.