Taiye Winful is an Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Scholar in the Anthropology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She completed her B.S. in Molecular Biology at Loyola University Chicago and went on to earn her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She then completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Vanderbilt University in 2024, where her dissertation work was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG-BA).

As a biocultural genetic anthropologist, Taiye’s research explores how life experiences become embodied. Specifically, her work focuses on understanding how social factors, through stress, “get under the skin” to cause biological dysregulation in inflammatory responses and consequently influence health and health disparities in African and African diasporic populations, using epigenetic methods. She also has a growing interest in exploring how perceptions of stress, through narrative, can mediate the biological pathways linking stress to inflammation."