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I am involved in three field research projects among traditional populations in Venezuela, Mexico and Madagascar. These projects all involve collecting detailed, longitudinal and individual data and share common questions concerning population growth, life history, reproductive ecology, maternal and child health, and the effects of market integration on small-scale societies. These projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Packard Foundation and Milton Fund.
I maintain an active research program with a group of Maya subsistence agriculturalists living in the Puuc region of Yucatan, Mexico. When I first started working with the Maya 17 years ago, the village had no running water or electricity, men only occasionally worked in wage labor and market foods were infrequently consumed. There was no health care in the village and since vehicle access was rare, medical intervention was uncommon. 
Women had no access to contraception. The initial field research focused on the relationship between female energetics and fertility and the role that child labor played in underwriting high fertility in a pre-demographic transition economy. A spate of socioeconomic changes began to occur several years ago. Electricity was brought to the village, schools and a road were built, new farming techniques were introduced, and involvement in the regional economy greatly accelerated. These changes are having far reaching effects on health, fertility, labor and social organization. Importantly, they are not affecting all households equally. Wealth stratification is emerging for the first time as the village transitions from an egalitarian community to one in which some families now hold a priority interest in access to land and other resources. Some women now have access to family planning and fertility variance has become pronounced.
We are currently working on a new multi-year project to investigate the interaction between these economic and demographic transitions. Because detailed reproductive history, anthropometric, economic and time allocation data were collected prior to these changes, it establishes a multivariable baseline from which to evaluate longitudinal effects on the quality of childrens lives, their economic role in the fertility transition, and the development of wealth differentials. This phase of Maya research incorporates students, bioanthropologists, soil scientists and GIS specialists to investigate how changes in farming practices, land availability and economic diversification influence variance in the timing of maturation, mortality, fertility, wealth and access to education and health care. 
Recently I completed a five-year project with two genetically related, but economically contrasting groups of native South Americans. The Pumé of west-central Venezuela are comprised of both traditional savanna-dwelling hunter-gatherers and their horticultural neighbors who live along the regions major rivers. This project is in collaboration with my husband, Russell Greaves who has worked with the Pumé since 1990. This phase of field work involved collecting census, reproductive history, anthropometric, time allocation and economic data in three horticultural (River Pumé) and three hunter-gatherer communities (Savanna Pumé). Reproductive histories, genealogies and growth data covering 20 years are now available for several communities, and represents one of the few longitudinal data sets for a group of hunter-gatherers.
The Pumé project includes a collaborative study of locomotor behavior, subsistence, energetic expenditures of men and women, seasonal and interannual variation in body mass. The Pumé are genetically and linguistically distinct from their neighbors. The project hopes to initiate DNA research to investigate migration patterns and the relationship of the Pumé to other South American populations. 
Graduate student projects involve Pumé time allocation and maternal and child health data. Pumé infant thymus growth is being studied in a comparative graduate student project with the Tsimane, a group of Bolivian horticulturalists. Thymus dimension in young children is a biomarker that can potentially distinguish between the effects that nutrition and disease have on child morbidity and mortality. However, its function is understudied and little is known about its phenotypic variation. This is the first study of thymus growth among traditional people and is potentially of great relevance in evaluating whether public health funding is best directed toward child nutrition or disease intervention.
I have been involved in a long-term interdisciplinary project with Patricia Wright (Stony Brook University) and a team of primatologists and conservation biologists to evaluate the interaction between population growth, farming and land-use practices among the Tanala, rice farmers in Madagascars central highlands. The projects primary aim is to better understand the complex interrelationships between Tanala land use practices and their effects on biodiversity and deforestation around Ranomafana National Park. 