Academic background

I completed my PhD at LSHTM in March 2014, and was employed there as a post-doctoral Research Fellow until August 2016. Before my current post at Oxford Anthropology, I completed an ERC-funded postdoc working with Christiaan Monden in the Oxford Sociology department, mostly looking at the impact of family size on socioeconomic inequality, and the impact of grandparents on social mobility. 

I started my academic life at the University of East London with a first class BSc (Honours) degree in Anthropology with Native American Studies. During that time, I visited the University of New Mexico for a year as an international student and it was here that I discovered my passion for all topics in Human Evolutionary Ecology. I then went on to complete an MSc with Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford in 2009. After this, I was awarded 1+3 ESRC quota funding to undertake a second MSc (this time in Social Research Methods) at the London School of Economics under the guidance of Jouni Kuha, Jon Jackson, and Rebecca Sear. On completion, I continued my PhD research with Rebecca as my supervisor, and then on her ERC-funded Family Matters project as a post-doc at LSHTM.

I am part of Rebecca's Evolutionary Demography Group, which has produced a number of papers assessing the influence of kin on reproduction, and child health outcomes, in both high and low fertility settings. I have collaborated with various cross-disciplinary and international colleagues, including as an invited member of the NesCent workshop in North Carolina, USA. Our work there has culminated in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society journal entitled: Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?

I am also affiliated with the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and have an ongoing collaborative relationship with Justin Garcia; and we have published three papers with three more in the pipeline.

See here for a full publication list