Dr. Christine Wilson, scholar in nutritional anthropology
WASHINGTON -- Christine Shearer Wilson, who died of a stroke May 31 at her brother's home in Annapolis, was an influential scholar in the development of nutritional anthropology -- a scientific discipline that lends understanding to the reasons people eat what they eat as well as when, how, and where they eat. She was 86.
Dr. Wilson joined a group of other scholars in the 1970s as they began to connect two dissimilar fields, the science of nutrition and the social science of anthropology. The early works of noted anthropologists Audrey Richards and Margaret Mead laid the foundation for a field that examines the intersection of nutrition, human behavior, and culture.
With her training in biochemistry, nutrition, epidemiology, and anthropology, Dr. Wilson became a major force in establishing the interdisciplinary field as an independent science.
She was a ''founding mother" of nutritional anthropology, said Leslie Sue Lieberman, director of the Women's Research Center at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
''She shaped the discipline with her own research publications and presentations, her innovated teaching, her more than two decades as editor of Ecology of Food and Nutrition, and her organization of national and international symposia and conferences," Lieberman once stated.
Dr. Wilson was born in Orleans, Mass. As a child, she was given an IQ test and was found to be quite bright. She wasn't encouraged to go to college, however, and after high school she went to secretarial school. ''One of the lasting benefits of this experience was shorthand, which proved useful for college work and fields studies," she told Lieberman in 1998 for an archival interview.
Eventually, she attended Brown University, graduating with a biology degree. She worked as a research assistant in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and later became assistant editor of Nutrition Reviews.
Dr. Wilson left Harvard in 1956, worked as a nutritional analyst for the Department of Agriculture, and was a publications editor and technical writer with the US Public Health Service.
She held a number of positions throughout her career, including with the Food Research Institute at Stanford University. She taught at the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Guelph in Ontario, San Francisco State University, St. George's University in Grenada, and the University of Delaware, among others. 