Emma Garval ’21 received first-place honors in the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ (NIEHS) communication challenge, in which NIEHS summer interns presented their research in less than three minutes. Garval’s research focused on the relationship between obesity and changes to what’s referred to as one’s “epigenetic clock.” She found a correlation between obesity and increased biological (versus chronological) age, a marker of increased mortality. “These clocks are really interesting because they are strongly related to risk of dying, even more so than actual age,” she said.