I'm a developmental scientist studying how culture shapes the mind.

I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology.

Research Interests

Humans are a remarkable species, numbering in the billions and inhabiting every single ecology on the planet. How do we pull this off?

One secret to our success is culture. We have incredibly diverse bodies of knowledge that orient us to our social and ecological worlds.

But another big part of our success concerns development. Humans have a unique developmental trajectory, with an extended period of dependence we call childhood. Childhood is an incredibly flexible and sensitive life stage primarily devoted to learning — both individually and socially — about the very specific world we inhabit, in contrast to the many million possible worlds we could inhabit.

My research examines this dynamic and uniquely human process, focusing on how our behavior, preferences, and decision-making are shaped across diverse cultural environments.

Click here for PDFs of my publications.

Research

Fieldwork

Cross-Cultural Research

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.

I frequently work with the Shuar, an Indigenous forager-horticulturalist group living in Amazonian Ecuador, as part of the larger Shuar Health and Life History Project.

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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 (FCS) Research Group

Shuar Health & Life History Project

Science Outreach

POPULAR SCIENCE

👆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.