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About Me

I graduated from CSU Sacramento in Spring 2007 with my BA in Anthropology.  Now, I am a first-year graduate student in the UW Biocultural Anthropology program.  My advisor is Dr. Eric Alden Smith. 

Along with Megan van Wolkenten (WSU Anthropology), Adam Boyette (WSU Anthropology), and Devin Drown (WSU Biology), I've been awarded the IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling (IPEM) two-year grant.  I'm very excited about this grant as the goals of IPEM are to integrate biology and anthropology under the auspices of applying model-based approaches to biological and cultural evolution.  We've just begun planning a team project aimed toward meeting that goal.

Research Interests

My IPEM training will prepare me for research avenues pertinent to current events.  International aid and development organizations would benefit from a clearer understanding of the social problems they purport to mitigate, such as the prevalence and increase of marked social inequality and its associated ills (i.e. starvation, disease, social unrest, and violence).  Identifying how culture and ecology intersect with individual motives to produce large-scale inequity has and will continue to help build this understanding.  Computational agent-based modeling experiments based on inequality research and theory could help identify, quantify, and test our assumptions about how these systems emerge, evolve, and relate to similar situations in nature before risking ineffectual and dangerous intervention on the ground.  Simple, general models of inequality could also assist researchers in the comparative analysis of colonial and postcolonial political economics across space and time.  These complex problems deserve the same scientific rigor afforded to other academic subjects.