Research Interests
My favorite part of being a theoretician is that it allows me to study a range of questions. Though I view myself as a generalist with multiple themes throughout my work (highlighted below), a unifying theme is a consideration of dynamical feedbacks between population structures, population dynamics, and behavior.
Ecology and Evolution of Social Behavior
I am broadly interested social behavior, though my focus is on the importance social structures in population dynamics and social evolution:
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I am especially interested in group-level Allee effects (positive density dependence in small groups) and how they can arise from cooperative behavior. Work in this area has shown that social structures may buffer populations from population-level Allee effects, that processes occurring at the group-level have a important role in shaping the population dynamics in social species, and also that Allee effects can mediate the coevolution of cooperation and group size.
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Microbial cooperation is another example of how cooperation can feed back with environmental conditions to shape the evolution of cooperation that I am working on.
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I am also interested in collective decision making. Collective decision theory has been developed largely through the lens of animal movement. I have studied the effectiveness of collective decisions on group fission events from a network theoretic perspective. This work has shown that egalitarian fissions are less disruptive to social networks and provides evidence that baboon fissions are egalitarian.
Ecology and Evolution of Reproductive Behavior
Reproductive behavior (especially sexual selection and mate choice) is another primary area of interest:
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Once again, my interests often lie in cases where mate choice interacts with population structures and population dynamics. For example, I have studied the role of space in shaping interactions between the sexes and also how feedbacks between divorce and the social environment influence the evolution of divorce.
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I also study the evolution same-sex sexual behavior in animals, in particular the possibility that indiscriminate mating is adaptive.
Importance of Structured Populations
A major theme throughout my work has been structured populations:
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As mentioned above, I have shown that population structures act as a buffer for population dynamics.
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I am interested in how population structures (such as groups) coevolve with behaviors that give rise to such structures (such as cooperation)
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I am also interested in spatial structure both in the context of mate choice and community ecology.
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I am studying how network structure mediates collective decisions. Work in this area has focused on group fissions in baboons (network pictured).