Researcher Profiles

David F. Bjorklund, PhD (Email, Website)

David F. Bjorklund is a Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University where he teaches courses in developmental and evolutionary psychology. He has served as Associate Editor of Child Development (1997-2001) and as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (2007-2024). He currently serves as Series Editor for Cambridge Elements in Applied Evolutionary Science. He has published widely on the topics of cognitive development, evolutionary developmental psychology, and evolutionary educational psychology. Some of his recent books include How Children Invented Humanity: The Role of Development in Human Evolution (2021, Oxford); Child Development in Evolutionary Perspective (2020, Cambridge); Evolutionary Perspectives on Infancy (2022, Springer, co-edited with Sybil Hart); and Children's Thinking: Cognitive Development and Individual Differences (2023, Sage), now in its seventh edition. 

Jennie Brown, PhD (Email)

Jennie Brown is a psychology professor and clinical mental health counseling student whose work bridges evolutionary science and applied practice. With a background in psychology and a current research focus on gamification, Team-based Learning , and mental health, Jennie designs interventions that promote academic success, emotional well-being, and social connection—especially in undergraduate populations. Her current projects include developing a program grounded in evolutionary psychology, tiny habits, and nudging to improve undergraduate thriving. Jennie also serves as secretary for the Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society and actively integrates evolutionary theory into teaching and research. 

Bruce J. Ellis, PhD (Email)

Bruce J. Ellis, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Utah.  As an interdisciplinary scientist, Dr. Ellis leverages knowledge from both evolutionary biology and developmental science in his research on social and cognitive adaptations to stress.  The guiding premise of his work is that early adversity prompts the development of costly but adaptive strategies that promote survival and reproduction under stressful conditions.  A major focus of his work has been the development of the Hidden Talents Framework, which seeks to uncover a high-resolution map of the intact, or even enhanced, skills that emerge in harsh, unpredictable environments (i.e., stress-adapted skills), their development, and their manifestation in different contexts. The applied goal of the Hidden Talents Framework is to work with positive stress-adapted skills to inform efforts and programs that potentiate success in education, employment, and civic life among adversity-exposed people.  Dr. Ellis is a recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Interdisciplinary Understanding of Child Development Award from the Society for Research in Child Development.

David Geary, PhD (Email, Website)

David C. Geary is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri. His work spans topics ranging from children’s mathematical cognition to the evolution of sex differences. He’s written extensively on evolutionary educational psychology and prosed a distinction between evolved, biologically primary abilities (e.g., language) and secondary abilities (e.g., reading, math) that are built from primary systems through schooling. A recent discussion is found in The Evolved Mind and Modern Education (2024, Cambridge University Press). He served on the President’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel and was appointed by President G. W. Bush to the National Board of Advisors for the Institute of Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Among other honors, he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a recipient of a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, and a recipient of the G. Stanley Hall Award for Lifetime Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Psychology. 

Glenn Geher, PhD (Email, Website)

Glenn Geher is Professor of Psychology as well as Founding Director of Evolutionary Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Glenn's work covers nearly all aspects related to an evolutionary understanding of the human condition. Glenn recently developed the idea of Positive Evolutionary Psychology, which focuses on using work from the field of evolutionary psychology to help people live richer lives. 

Peter Gray, PhD (Email, Website)

Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College who has conducted and published research in behavioral biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and education. He is author of six editions (and co-author of two more editions) of an introductory psychology textbook (Psychology, Worth Publishers), which views all of psychology from an evolutionary perspective. Much of his research focuses on the role of play in human evolution and how children educate themselves through play and exploration. He has expanded on these ideas in his book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books). For more, see petergray.org/ 

Kathryne Gruskin (Email, Website)

Katie Gruskin is an elementary teacher, adjunct lecturer, and visiting researcher in Dr. Glenn Geher's Evolutionary Psychology lab at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She is interested in the intersection of elementary pedagogical practices and evolutionary psychology. Her work focuses on the ways that teachers and other educational stakeholders can reduce evolutionary mismatch to improve schooling practices and thus outcomes for modern students. 

Jonathan Haidt, PhD (Email, Website)

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. His most recent book is the New York Times #1 bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. 

Florence Lespiau, PhD (Email)

Florence Lespiau is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Nîmes University (France) and a researcher at the APSY-v Laboratory. Her research explores how insights from evolutionary psychology can enhance learning, education, and reasoning. She focuses on how primary knowledge—evolutionarily early knowledge—supports logical reasoning and learning more effectively than secondary knowledge. Her work examines how primary knowledge reduces cognitive load and boosts learner motivation, ultimately facilitating the acquisition of more complex secondary knowledge. She is also interested in applying evolutionary cognitive principles to improve teaching and learning practices. 

Jessica Murray, PhD (Email)

Jessica Murray is a former high school teacher and psychology professor who has recently shifted roles to become the Assistant Director for Student Success at Colgate University in the Center for Learning, Teaching, and Research. Her research is grounded in applied evolutionary developmental and educational psychology and works to provide empirical evidence of how life history theory and the hidden talents framework can be used to strengthen pedagogy and support student learning. 

John Sweller, PhD (Email)

John Sweller is an Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of New South Wales. His research is associated with cognitive load theory. The theory is a contributor to both research and debate on issues associated with human cognition, its links to evolution by natural selection, and the instructional design consequences that follow. Based on many hundreds of randomized, controlled studies carried out by many investigators from around the globe, the theory has generated a large range of novel instructional procedures from our knowledge of human cognitive architecture. 

Tony Volk, PhD (Email)

Prof. Volk is a developmental scientist interested in the separate, but related, areas of bullying, parenting, personality, psychopathy, and the evolution of childhood. These broad areas of research lend themselves to a broad scope of theoretical and methodological approaches. A strong believer in multidisciplinary studies, Prof. Volk’s overall interest is to gain an evolutionary, psychological, biological, neurological, health-based, Indigenous, cross-cultural, social, historical, and (if possible) transdisciplinary understanding of why individuals do what they do.

More coming soon