Lauren C. Houghton, PhD, takes a life course approach to understanding the intersection of environmental and hormonal factors in breast cancer carcinogenesis, focusing primarily on exposures during puberty. Dr. Houghton is interested in how culture gets beneath the skin, specifically in relation to women's reproductive lives from puberty to child rearing to menopause. She gained experience in Cancer Epidemiology as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute where she explored international variation in sex steroids and other biomarkers. She has extensively worked with migrant studies in Bangladesh, the UK and Mongolia to better understand genetic and environmental risk factors among females moving from low to high risk geographic areas. She has conducted fieldwork with Native Americans in the US, menopausal women in the UK and school girls in Bangladesh and is currently a co-investigator of The LEGACY girls study in New York City. Having a background in anthropology, Dr. Houghton is also interested in developing mixed-methods to be implemented in epidemiological studies to better capture biological and cultural mediators of health disparities.