About me

I worked in restaurants, retail management (toy stores, flower shops), building construction, a quality control assembly line, an architectural firm and a government office. Then I went into the Peace Corps. Then I got a Master's degree in urban planning from the University of Southern California, did some graduate work in economics, and completed a PhD in biological anthropology from UCLA, with a thesis on the cultural evolution of food taboos in a population of horticulturalists and pygmy foragers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Following that, I worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago (in culture and mental health) and at King's College Cambridge (in evolutionary psychology) before becoming a researcher in Evolutionary Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Through my job, I get to travel a fair amount, helping people to live healthier lives, while trying to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity about how everything in the universe evolved. It's a rewarding life.