Steve Hamm is a freelance writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of The Pivot: Addressing Global Problems Through Local Action, and Bangalore Tiger, and co-author with John Kelly of Smart Machines. More»
Dr. Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is deeply interested in moral philosophy and its history, and is focused on questions around the nature of moral obligation and well-being. More»
Dr. Annie Wertz is Research Group Leader of the MPRG Naturalistic Social Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Her research investigates how infants and young children think about and learn from other people in naturalistic circumstances. Her work provided the first evidence that human infants do indeed possess behavioral and social learning strategies that are selective to plants (e.g., infants avoid plant dangers and selectively learn that some plants are edible). Her research provides a window into the complex interplay of evolutionary and developmental factors that allow human beings to learn from others and accumulate cultural knowledge. More»
Dr. Justin Gregg is a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project and an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University, where he lectures on animal behavior and cognition. Originally from Vermont, Dr. Gregg studied the echolocation abilities of wild dolphins in Japan and the Bahamas. He is the author of If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. More»
Dr. Luana Maroja is Professor of Biology at Williams College. She is interested in the evolution of barriers to gene exchange, speciation, population genetics and phylogeography. Her study systems are crickets (Gryllus), artic plants and butterflies (heliconius). More»
Dr. Scott Grafton is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Grafton is interested in how people organize movement into goal-oriented action. The emphasis is on elucidating the cognitive architecture that underlies action representation. This is developed with studies of sequence and skill acquisition, motor simulation, sensorimotor transformation, on-line control and action observation experiments. He is the author of Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life. More»
Dr. Summer Mengelkoch has recently finished her PhD in experimental social psychology at Texas Christian University. She has just accepted a postdoc position at UCLA under George Slavich. She earned a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 2013, and an M.S. From Texas Christian University in 2020. Dr. Mengelkoch seeks to better understand relationships between biology and behavior. To do so, she investigates relationships between biological factors (including hormones, hormonal contraceptive use, and immune function) and behaviors (including eating behavior, mate preferences, cognition, and decision-making). More»
Dr. Johannes Mahr is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Schacter Memory Lab at Harvard University. He will be a professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. Before that, he was a Mind, Brain, and Behavior Fellow with a joint appointment in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology at Harvard. He completed his PhD in Cognitive Science under the supervision of Gergely Csibra and Dan Sperber at Central European University. His work combines philosophical and empirical approaches to study episodic memory, imagination, and human communication. More»
Dr. Christopher von Rueden is Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. An anthropologist with expertise in traditional human societies, his research focuses on how humans form status hierarchies, why we evolved to do so, and the demographic and ecological factors that cause our hierarchies to be more or less coercive. Relatedly, he studies the role of leader-follower relationships in the evolution of human cooperation. In addition to his work on status and leadership, he has published on topics such as why humans differ in personality traits and why we have such unique life histories among primates. More»
Dr. Kristina Durante is an evolutionary psychologist and Professor of Marketing, Marketing Department Vice Chair, and the marketing Ph.D. program coordinator at Rutgers Business School. She is a social psychologist interested in the biology of decision-making. Her research lies at the intersection of social psychology, evolutionary biology, and consumer decision-making. Her areas of expertise include women’s consumer choice and luxury spending, family consumer decisions, hormones and behavior, and the psychological consequences of ambiguity. More»
