Rethinking extreme environments, from human spaceflight to heat in Philadelphia
Anthropology professor Mallika Sarma of the School of Arts & Sciences is challenging what we think of as an extreme environment—beyond settings like low temperature or high altitude—and who gets studied.
Mallika Sarma lives life to the extreme.
From a personal life that includes rigorous training in the Indian classical dance of Bharatanatyam as a child and Olympic weightlifting as an adult to a professional life of research at high altitudes in Nepal and among foragers in a remote Congo village, Sarma has always sought challenges.
“I’m a cliche,” she says with a laugh amid a fast-talking interview, sitting in her Penn Museum office between the walls she had painted bubblegum pink when she arrived at Penn last summer as an assistant professor of anthropology. Across the room is a whiteboard that bears the question driving her work: “When the going gets tough, how do we stay going?”
With a background in human biology—an interdisciplinary field focused on human variation in evolutionary, environmental, and social contexts—Sarma studies how humans adapt to extreme and novel environments. Core to her research is understanding the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which regulates the body’s response to stress, and the stress hormone, cortisol.
Read more at Penn Today.