
Who am I?
I am a Lecturer in Quantitative Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. I work alongside anthropologists, archaeologists, and biologists to study human behaviour from an evolutionary point of view. In particular, I am interested in social organisation and its relationship with kinship, cooperation, and conflict.
Questions that I have worked on include:
- Why do hunter-gatherers share food?
- Why are in-laws such an important part of human social life?
- What factors determine the relatedness structure of animal groups?
- Can conflicts between meerkat groups shed light on the evolution of human war?
Things I do or have done in my research include:
- Ethnographic fieldwork: with Agta hunter-gatherers in the northern Philippines and fishing communities in the Brazilian Pantanal
- Zoological fieldwork with meerkats in the Kalahari
- Computational modelling (see 'Code' tab above)
- Simple mathematical modelling
Subjects I teach at UCL include:
- Human behavioural ecology
- Evolutionary theory
- Quantitative research methods
Find out more:
To see a full list of my publications see my GoogleScholar page here.
To find out more about evolutionary anthropology at UCL click here.
To find out about our MSc degree in Human Evolution and Behaviour click here.