Elżbieta Żądzińskaa
University of Lodz, Poland
Biography
Maciej is an experienced academic, scientist and researcher with over 52 years of expertise in human biology and anatomy. Currently an Emeritus Wood Jones Professor of Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy in Adelaide and the Academic Guest in the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich. His work covers human evolution, phenotypic variation, child growth, demographic genetics, palaeopathology and epidemiology. He has conducted studies of child growth and development in Africa, Aboriginal Australia and Indonesia. Supervised over 30 PhD projects by scientists, medical practitioners and nurses. Some of his PhD graduates are now professors in universities in Australia, South Africa, Switzerland and Poland.
Research Interest
The pubertal spurt is considered a universal trait of the Homo sapiens species. However, observations of growth in the 19th c. and in small traditional societies showed for some children a steady growth without a noticeable pubertal spurt. Widely used growth models covering the entire postnatal ontogeny, such as the Preece-Baines polynomial model 1 or the SITAR model, use a fixed number of parameters to describe growth during puberty, the values of which must be estimated regardless of the shape of an individual's growth curve. In this approach long-term longitudinal data of 110 Polish girls aged 6-18 years were analyzed (1314 height measurements) by fitting polynomial regressions of body height on age and assessing their first and second derivatives as growth velocity and acceleration. This method is free from arbitrary assumptions.