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I am a writer, anthropologist, data scientist, and educator interested in the things people often overlook, avoid, or take for granted. My work explores human behavior, humor, taboo, culture, inequality, and the uncomfortable realities hiding in plain sight. I draw on evolutionary theory, social science, statistics, and personal experience to ask questions that don't always fit neatly into conventional academic or political categories.
My scholarly work has appeared in leading scientific journals, and my essays and commentary have appeared in publications including Scientific American, The Nation, Quillette, and others. I also write The Laughing Ape on Substack, where I explore humor, human nature, cultural taboos, and the strange contradictions of modern life.
I have published more than 25 first author papers in high impact interdisciplinary scientific journals including Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour and Proceedings B and have taught multiple college courses
My research to data has used evolutionary theory to understand human behavior and has been focused on a range of topics including the impact of immigration on social networks, what predicts social mobility, tribalism, the relationship between social capital, loneliness and the rise of populism, the effect of marriage practices on reproduction and the evolutionary function of humor.
I received my PhD at Rutgers advised by Robert Trivers doing research in Iceland on the effects of parental investment on life history outcomes such as reproduction and lifespan.
My current research with the Shenk Research Group in the anthropology department at Penn State is centered around seeking to understand how religion increases cooperation which can lead to higher fertility and greater social mobility. My research in Finland with the Human Life History Project was focused on understand the impact of immigration on life history traits, while my time at the University of Missouri was spent analyzing a database of previously uncontacted Yanomamo Indians from the Amazon rainforest
I am a bio cultural anthropologist, specializing in how biology, the environment and culture come together
to shape health and behavior
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