Monica Keith

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Dr. Keith is currently accepting graduate applications for Fall 2025-APPLY TODAY

Monica Keith is a biological anthropologist, data scientist, and director of the Anthropological Health & Data Science (AHDS) Lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. She researches health disparities and human variation in a biosocial framework that integrates health, socioecological, and genetic data. Her scholarship is focused on addressing disparities in maternal and reproductive health, child growth and nutrition, disease risk, and cardiometabolic health across the life course. She collaborates on several longitudinal field studies with subsistence-based and Indigenous communities in Dominica, Bangladesh, and Argentina. Her focus on reproductive health also extends to the US, where she works with data from the NIH National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to address racialized disparities in pregnancy and birth outcomes. Another emerging area of her scholarship examines the impacts of climate change and environmental exposures, such as extreme heat and flooding, on human physiology, behavior, and health outcomes.

Visit Dr. Keith’s website for more on her research and the AHDS Lab.

Courses Offered

ANTH 1301: Introduction to Biological Anthropology

ANTH 2342: Biology of Inequality

ANTH 3401W: Evolutionary Biology of Womxn

ANTH 8400: Graduate Seminar in Statistical Methods