I use mathematical models and ethnographic field research to understand human culture, cooperation, and conflict – especially in the contexts of political organization and war.
I also have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Turkana pastoralist warriors in northwest Kenya. They also have a high degree of combat exposure – with about half of adult male mortality due to combat in cattle raids. I am interested in how Turkana organization for war has influenced their susceptibility to combat stress and moral injury. I have interviewed hundreds of warriors about their combat experiences, moral beliefs about warfare, combat stress symptoms, and moral injury.
I was previously a Donald R. Beall Defense Fellow in my current department, a postdoctoral research fellow at ASU’s Institute of Human Origins, a member of the Adaptation, Behavior, Culture and Society research group in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis. I earned my PhD at the University of California, Davis in the Cultural Evolution and Human Behavioral Ecology Labs.
I am also a US Air Force veteran with six years of service as a civil engineering officer with deployments to the UAE and Afghanistan.