I am a behavioral scientist interested in how culture shapes the developing mind.

I'm currently a postdoc at the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research explores the diversity of human behavior from a cross-cultural, developmental perspective.

Most of my work focuses on decision-making, trying to understand the forces that shape our choices throughout our lifetime. To explore this topic, I bring together a diverse set of tools from fields like anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics.

FIELDWORK

As most of what we know about human behavior still comes from people living in WEIRD populations — those that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — my research employs a cross-cultural perspective to explore the diversity of human behavior around the world.

My primary fieldwork takes place among the Shuar, an indigenous forager-horticulturalist group living in Amazonian Ecuador, in collaboration with the larger Shuar Health and Life History Project.

I complement this work with fieldwork in India and Uganda, in addition to research collaborations involving field sites across five continents.

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COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH NETWORKS

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Culture & Ontogeny Research Initiative

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The Virtue Project at Boston College

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Forager
Child Studies

Shuar Health & Life History Project

SCIENCE OUTREACH

👆My 2022 Garden talk, "How Does Where Grow Up Impact Who You Become?".

In this talk, I focus on the importance of childhood as a uniquely human developmental stage, and the role that early experiences play in shaping our language, preferences, and personality traits.

👆My 2019 TEDxCambridge talk, "How Industrialization Changed Childhood".

The basic gist: Forces like industrialization have eroded some of the hallmarks of human childhood — such as independence, unstructured play, & mixed-age playgroups — which may still serve important functions for kids today. Perhaps we ought to work harder to preserve them.