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I'm an evolutionary and biocultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary behavioral scientist. I study the mechanisms of sociality that support our species' unique capacity for cooperation, and the social and biological causes and consequences that follow from it.

I use two distinct methodological approaches in my research program, which together let me evaluate both human universality and diversity. The first is long-term ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Ethiopia. My initial fieldwork was among the forest-dwelling Chabu forager-horticulturalists, and since 2019, I've worked across four mostly pastoralist communities in the Omo Valley region, the Hamar, Kara, Kwegu, and Nyangatom, through the Omo Valley Research Project, which I co-founded and co-direct. The second is comparative analyses of cross-cultural databases I build from the global ethnographic record. Both of these approaches provide quantitative data that I analyze with computational methods, including Bayesian models, text analysis, social network analysis, and agent-based models.

Three main questions drive this work. Who leads a community or group, and what do leaders actually do? I developed the Multi-Capital Leadership Theory, which treats leadership as grounded in four forms of capital: material, social, somatic, and neural. How are cooperative norms taught and kept stable across generations? My Leader-Directed Teaching Hypothesis positions community leaders as central agents in transmitting hard-to-observe norms through direct teaching. And how do people manage risk through their social relationships? Even in strongly patriarchal settings, I find that social ties form across ethnic and gender lines, and are one way relational structure buffers risk under pressure.

I join ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ in August 2026 as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Before this, I was an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Morocco and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse in France. I earned my PhD in anthropology at Washington State University and my undergraduate degree in anthropology and psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. I am an Associate Editor at the Journal of Cognition and Culture, an editorial board member at Evolution and Human Behavior, a consulting editor at Human Nature, and a special issue editor at Hunter Gatherer Research. I also write Ecology of Minds, a blog on culture, context, and evolution, for Psychology Today.

What keeps me in this work is a love of fieldwork, a deep curiosity for understanding what makes us human, a sense of obligation to the communities I work with, and a standing invitation to students chasing big questions about who we are.

Outside of work, I'm happily married, and our blended family includes three Pomeranians (my wife's) and my two cats (both named after anthropologists), with our first human child due in fall 2026. My wife is from southwest France, and we love traveling, hunting down restaurants in its small villages, and finding DIY and crafty projects to do while listening to music. Music is my biggest passion outside of family and work. I'm a guitarist and an audiophile, and an old-school millennial who still curates my own digital library by hand. It's an audiophile-grade archive of 16,000+ releases, overwhelmingly lossless, mostly spanning the 1950s to today with a strong contemporary bias and ranging across hip-hop, hyperpop, electronic, jazz, blues, americana, and soul, with a respectable francophone and world-music streak.