About Me

I was born on a dark and stormy morning in Sydney, Australia. Over the next few years, I lived with my family in Australia (Sydney, Cape York, Alice Springs), New Zealand (Wellington), Denmark (Copenhagen), and the United States (Indiana, Boston). I did my undergraduate degree in Psychology and East Asian History at McGill University in Montreal Canada, and my PhD in social and quantitative psychology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I now live in Chicago where I work at University of Chicago in the Behavioral Science Department of the Booth School of Business.

Perhaps because of this nomadic life, I am interested in human culture. I compare cultural differences between geographic regions, and I also study cultural change over long periods of time within the same region. Most of my work is guided by theoretical models of cultural evolution. These models explore how variance, competition, and inheritance affect cultural change over time, with implications for individuals within cultural systems. Cultural evolutionary models often resemble models of biological evolution, but there are many unique properties of cultural evolution and we are only beginning to discover these properties. As a graduate student, I worked on a steering committee to form the Cultural Evolution Society. Our committee also co-authored a paper outlining grand challenges for cultural evolutionists. I have more recently supported a subfield of psychological science devoted to “Historical Psychology“ in which we use cultural evolutionary theory to explain historical changes in how people think and behave.

My research has applied cultural evolutionary models to a variety of psychological domains, such as emotion, religious belief, political ideology, and prejudice. I believe that studying these different psychological domains can identify broader principles of cultural evolution, just like studying different species can enrich our understanding of genetic evolution. In addition to theory-driven research, I have tried to popularize methods of studying cultural evolution within psychological science such as in-vivo tracking, language analysis, agent-based modeling, and ethnographic analysis. I try to take an interdisciplinary approach to this work, borrowing methods and theory from biology, linguistics, anthropology, and computer science. I work with scientists from all of these disciplines, and I believe the future of behavioral science involves large multidisciplinary teams.

In a past life, I did science communication as well as research. I was an early contributor to Useful Science, which is a science communication non-profit with a website and podcast. I managed the podcast for several years before retiring from the role in 2020. Outside of research, I like to run, play disc golf, and learn new languages (common denominator is that these were all possible on a grad student budget). Right now I am learning Japanese and trying to get to fluent French. My last race was a half-marathon in Charlottesville, and the race before that was a marathon in Denver. I’m now in the market for a race with fewer hills.