Fellows are elected by their peers in AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, publisher of the journal Science. McGarvey is among 471 members awarded the honor this year for distinguished efforts to advance science and its applications. This year’s AAAS fellows will be announced in the Oct. 26, 2007, edition of Science and honored in a formal ceremony at the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston in February.

As part of the section on anthropology, McGarvey was elected for “discoveries about genetic, global, and local environmental contributions to diabetes, obesity and smoking among Pacific Islanders and the ecology of schistosomiasis in East Asia.”

McGarvey is professor of community health and anthropology and director of the International Health Institute at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. For more than 30 years, he has studied the effects of economic development on the health of Samoans, making him one of the world’s most established researchers on biological and health responses to global economic change. McGarvey has studied how modernization in Samoa has led to obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure through changes in diet, physical activity, stress and other environmental factors and the interplay of these factors with genetic susceptibilities. McGarvey has also conducted groundbreaking work on schistosomiasis, a debilitating parasitic disease, and the first demonstration of the effects of the disease on school-age children.

McGarvey has sat on several expert panels, including for the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization. He serves as co-editor of Annals of Human Biology and sits on various editorial boards, including the American Journal of Human Biology and Anthropological Science. He has taught at Brown since 1984.