Muna Aikins

External LIFE Fellow since 2022, MPI for Human Development

In June 2022, I joined the Max Planck Research Group Biosocial - Biology, Social Disparities, and Development. My doctoral research seeks to understand how experiences in childhood and adolescence tied to racial discrimination get under the skin to shape mental and physical health inequalities across the life span. To this end, I plan to examine biological aging indexed in methylomic measures and experience-based indices of discrimination-related stress in adolescents’ daily lives.
My academic background is in social science, social work and human rights. I am a principal investigator of the communities-based Afrozensus research project at Each One Teach One e.V. (EOTO), which is the first survey study on anti-Black racism and discrimination in Germany. My doctoral research will be also partly communities-based research.

Dissertation project:

Biosocial pathways of racialized inequalities in children‘s and adolescents‘ mental health

Publications

Aikins, M. A., Willems, Y. E., Fraemke, D., & Raffington, L. (2024). Beyond a shared history: A biosocial perspective on sociogenomics and racism in Germany. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 76, 573–602. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-024-00934-6

Raffington, L., Schwaba, T., Aikins, M., Richter, D., Wagner, G. G., Harden, K. P., Belsky, D. W., & Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2023). Associations of socioeconomic disparities with buccal DNA-methylation measures of biological aging. Clinical Epigenetics, 15, Article 70. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13148-023-01489-7