My research addresses two factors that partly explain the unique form of human sociality: an unprecedented reliance on socially transmitted information and the ability to cooperate in large groups. I combine empirical field studies with formal theoretical modeling to understand the evolution of these two aspects of human adaptation. In Sep 2011 I received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles where Robert Boyd was my supervisor. My dissertation research examined how the Turkana, an acephalous pastoral society in East Africa, solve the collective action problem in warfare. I also examined the scale of cooperation and norms in Turkana warfare, to evaluate the role of cultural evolutionary processes in shaping the scale of human cooperation. Since Oct 2011, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution at Stockholm University, working with Kimmo Eriksson, Magnus Enquist and Pontus Strimling on the evolution of social norms.

Below are some current projects and interests.

1. How do politically uncentralized societies solve the collective action problem in warfare?

3. 3.Has cultural group selection shaped large-scale sociality in humans?
   

4. 4.East African pastoralists
   

5. 5.Warfare in small-scale societies
   

6. 6.The evolution of social norms
   

7. 7.Mathematical models of the evolution of cooperation
   

I am also collaborating with Charles Perreault to use cultural phylogenetics to infer macro-scale characteristics of cultural evolutionary processes.