Hi! 👋

I’m a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Aarhus University in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, working on the Play|Object|Play project. Previously I have been a postdoc in the BirthRites lab at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and a postdoc in the Ecco lab in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. I completed my PhD in the Centre of Biological Diversity at the University of St Andrews.

I am an interdisciplinary researcher interested in understanding human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective using cultural evolution theory. My research addresses broad questions about cultural adaptation, cultural change, and innovation across domains like technology, norms, language, and music. I take a multi-method approach and explore these questions using empirical and experimental frameworks with realistic large-scale datasets, theoretical modelling through agent-based simulations, as well as data-driven causal inference techniques using advanced statistical methods.

Some of my current interests cosist of:

• Theoretical and data-driven investigations of the dynamics of cumulative cultural evolution and innovation
• The role of children’s play and children’s learning for cultural evolution and innovation
• Applying causal inference methods to cross-sectional data to understand how norms spread
• Analysing cross-cultural ethnographic data to understands patterns of cultural evolution
• Age and innovation across domains

You can read more about my work in my CV

🎓 You can find my Google Scholar profile here

🦋 I’m on Bluesky here