Dr. Sophia Dent is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Appalachian State University. Her research program asks three main questions about human nutrition: How does nutrition integrate multiple systems Sophia Dent of the body such as the skeletal system and the stress response system? How do food growing and land management practices affect nutrition? And, how can information from the past inform and contextualize current and future human and ecological health? Her research projects have been collaborative efforts to improve the reconstruction of nutrition from past contexts and understand past-to-present trajectories in nutritional inequities and nutrition-related disease. She aims to apply her work to improve food sovereignty and elevate Indigenous land management practices. She earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.