This year’s Round 1 IMMANA Fellows converged electronically from India to Uganda for their first journal club on 10 March 2016. The club was proposed and hosted by Mieghan Bruce, an IMMANA Fellow currently researching food system dynamics, animal health, and human nutrition in Tanzania. This first meeting was spent discussing the article “Does Livestock Ownership Affect the Household-level Consumption of Animal Source Foods and Child Nutritional Status in Rural Uganda?” by Carlo Azzarri and colleagues.

The Fellows ruminated on the use of economic variables as proxies for nutrition in their research, discussed the authors’ research methods, and even considered specific datasets relevant to their work, namely a dataset from the Ugandan Bureau of Statistics that current Fellow, Rosemary Isoto is utilizing for her research on nutritional barriers to agricultural productivity in smallholder farm households in Uganda. Fellows reflected on how the data, results, and models used in the paper both corresponded to, and failed to resemble, real life scenarios in Uganda and neighboring countries that Fellows have experience with. The discussion was further enriched by the Fellows’ diverse disciplinary foundations in everything from economics to nutrition, veterinary science, and epidemiology.

The next journal club will be hosted by a different Fellow, and is sure to generate more thought-provoking conversation. In the future, discussions will hopefully be recorded so that the broader research community can connect, as well. Keep an eye out on our blog and website for updates! 

The three articles under discussion were:                                                                     

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Insights courtesy of Caitlin Joseph