Updates on hair cortisol and election stress, 7/24-7/25:

1) Spent Monday with Professor Meyer (UMass-Amherst), who was one of the first to develop hair cortisol as a biomarker for stress. He was kind enough to offer us the training necessary to do hair cortisol concentration analysis in-house at Yale. We also discussed toenails, which grow slowly enough (1.5 mm/month) that collecting toenail clippings now from the relevant populations could give us a reading of cortisol levels dating all the way back to the election.

2) Spent Tuesday talking with faculty and potential funders here at Yale, as well as foundations in Connecticut about getting some money for the time-sensitive sample and data collection step (subject participation fees). After some very generous donations and commitments, we're now just about $1000 away for this first step (we're now hoping to sample from 100 people, for a total of 300 hair segments), and any support, whether a small donation or word-of-mouth, is a great help!

The project now has the necessary approvals, and we hope to start collecting samples next week.