Fishermen returning with their catch during high tide
How can evolutionary social sciences help solve collective action problems?
I am an interdisciplinary social scientist studying why and how people cooperate with one another. I work to apply this knowledge toward solving collective action problems such as natural resource management and climate change adaptation.
About Me
I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health at Washington State University. I work primarily with Kariuki Njenga and members of the Center for Research in Emerging Infectious Disease - East and Central Africa (CREID-ECA), studying how climate change is impacting zoonotic diseases, such as Rift Valley fever, and how communities in East Africa are adapting to these changes.
I co-direct with Anne Pisor the Human Sociality Lab, a cross-institutional research group between Pennsylvania State University and Washington State University that studies human sociality to tackle pressing problems of the 21st century. This includes directing the Tanga Sociality and Fisheries Project with Pisor and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder. The TSFP is a long-term project based in the Tanga region of Tanzania aimed at understanding how social relationships and marine resource usage affect each other, and how these interactions can be leveraged to support communities.
I previously worked as a research associate for the Geography of Philosophy Project, led by Edouard Machery, Clark Barrett, and Stephen Stich, examining cultural variation in folk concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and reasoning.
I received my PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, where I also completed a two-year postdoc in the Social Behavioral Science Initiative. I worked with Coren Apicella, studying how the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania maintain group cooperation and what traits they prefer in potential social partners.
With formal cross-training in experimental psychology, anthropology, and epidemiology, I focus on bringing a multidisciplinary set of tools to studying how humans work together to solve some of the biggest problem we are facing today.
