Welcome to my personal website
I am an anthropologist who is interested in how inherited stuff, whether genes or culture, gets passed among organisms through their networks and lineages. My research focuses on mixed qualitative-quantitative data. Topically my research for about the past 10 years has focused on how the public and knowledge professionals such as scientists, doctors, and journalists, interact to produce cultures of truth, falsehood, and things in between.
The story of how I got to that present place is that I began my anthropologist life as a primatologist, because I was deeply interested in the evolution of the learning mechanisms that undergird cultural traditions. For my dissertation work at NYU, I studied foraging traditions (simple forms of culture) of white-fronted capuchin monkeys and social learning in tufted capuchins. I then was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard working on genetic and cultural inheritance models before taking on work in applied research. My first job as a non-academic applied anthropologist was with a targeted marketing startup company that focused on social network methodologies (Activate Networks). I joined Activate in 2011, where I worked with a fantastic group of people and learned a lot. Then in 2014, I joined RAND, which allowed me to take my applied work in a more policy oriented direction and to pursue selectively more academic projects once again.
It has been at RAND that I was able to focus on the cultural dynamics that surround public-professional knowledge production, which I have come to see as a gradient running from misinformation at one end to citizen-led citizen science at the other end, and with lots of gray zones in between. Through working on this topic I developed an interest in ontological anthropology theory that at this point is pretty co-equal with my longstanding interests in evolutionary theory applied to anthropology. I generally try to have research questions and study systems drive methods than the other way around, and thus I've conducted studies ranging from wholly qualitative interview-based research to wholly quantitative statistical simulations. On the qualitative end, I particularly like studying various types of archives of documents that people produce as a natural part of their cultural lives, and on the quantitative end I am fond of inductive techniques for thick quantitative description such as cluster analysis, principal component analysis, and machine learning (including un/supervised ML and recent LLMs).
The publications portion of this site has citations and more about my research. While you are visiting you may want to check out my blog, which includes my unsolicited commentaries on some of my academic and personal interests: evolution, inheritance, religion, and statistical inference.
The story of how I got to that present place is that I began my anthropologist life as a primatologist, because I was deeply interested in the evolution of the learning mechanisms that undergird cultural traditions. For my dissertation work at NYU, I studied foraging traditions (simple forms of culture) of white-fronted capuchin monkeys and social learning in tufted capuchins. I then was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard working on genetic and cultural inheritance models before taking on work in applied research. My first job as a non-academic applied anthropologist was with a targeted marketing startup company that focused on social network methodologies (Activate Networks). I joined Activate in 2011, where I worked with a fantastic group of people and learned a lot. Then in 2014, I joined RAND, which allowed me to take my applied work in a more policy oriented direction and to pursue selectively more academic projects once again.
It has been at RAND that I was able to focus on the cultural dynamics that surround public-professional knowledge production, which I have come to see as a gradient running from misinformation at one end to citizen-led citizen science at the other end, and with lots of gray zones in between. Through working on this topic I developed an interest in ontological anthropology theory that at this point is pretty co-equal with my longstanding interests in evolutionary theory applied to anthropology. I generally try to have research questions and study systems drive methods than the other way around, and thus I've conducted studies ranging from wholly qualitative interview-based research to wholly quantitative statistical simulations. On the qualitative end, I particularly like studying various types of archives of documents that people produce as a natural part of their cultural lives, and on the quantitative end I am fond of inductive techniques for thick quantitative description such as cluster analysis, principal component analysis, and machine learning (including un/supervised ML and recent LLMs).
The publications portion of this site has citations and more about my research. While you are visiting you may want to check out my blog, which includes my unsolicited commentaries on some of my academic and personal interests: evolution, inheritance, religion, and statistical inference.
