Ashley Hazel – Ecological dynamics of sexually transmitted infections among Namibian pastoralists

Ashley Hazel: Stanford UniversityPopulations that are dependent upon physical environments for their immediate livelihoods utilize subsistence strategies that are both well adapted to predictable environmental variability (e.g., seasonality) and resilient to unpredictable shocks (e.g., drought). Livelihood strategies that entail high degrees of mobility typically have temporal and spatial heterogeneities in social contact, which influences infection […]

Alexandra Binder – Epigenetics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease

Alexandra Binder: University of California, Los AngelesThere is extensive epidemiologic and experimental evidence linking early life conditions to adult health. Epigenetic modifications are suspected to play a role in mediating these associations by providing a cellular memory of gene regulation shaped by exposures during critical windows of development. In this lecture, I will discuss some […]

Pam Yeh – How interactions among multiple stressors affect the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of populations

Pam Yeh: University of California, Los AngelesAll natural populations deal with multiple stressors. Yet there is limited understanding of how populations are impacted by higher-order interactions — more than two stressors. In this talk I will explain my new conceptual and experimental work to examine higher-order interactions among antibiotics in bacterial populations. I will also […]

Hazel Byrne – Molecular Neotropical Primatology: Titi Monkey Evolution

Hazel Byrne: University of California, Los AngelesNeotropical primates are a diverse clade of primates that inhabit South and Central America. Broadly speaking, in comparison to "Old World" primates originating in Africa and Asia, most Neotropical primates are strikingly understudied with many outstanding questions regarding their evolution. Among the least studied and appreciated groups are the […]

Katie Starkweather – “Why Risk It? Health Outcomes of Shodagor Women’s Work”

Katie Starkweather: University of New MexicoGendered divisions of labor are an essential aspect of human life. The two primary components of the gendered division of labor – subsistence work and childcare – are critical for child survival, health, and well-being, as well as the reproductive success of parents. In most human societies, women and men […]

Lee Gettler – The biology of fatherhood in context: Evolutionary origins, cross-cultural perspectives, and implications for men’s health

Lee Gettler: University of Notre DameHuman males have a flexible psychobiological capacity to respond to committed parenting with shifts in hormones such as testosterone, prolactin, and oxytocin. These findings hint at evolved neuroendocrine capacities that help facilitate refocused priorities as men make the transition into fatherhood. Evolutionarily, these capacities likely emerged alongside humans’ “slow” life […]

Brian Wood – Hadza hunter-gatherer movement ecology and the sexual division of labor

Brian Wood: University of California, Los AngelesHumans think about, explore, and use landscapes like no other species, reflecting our unique biological and cultural adaptations. One of these adaptations, observed in all hunter-gatherer societies, is a gendered division of foraging labor. The impacts that gendered economic roles have upon space use is a critical concern for […]

James Liu – Collective Remembering across Generations and across Cultures: Evidence for National Narrative Templates, Developmental Variants, and Global Anchors

James Liu: Massey University, New ZealandWhat is universal, what is characteristic of national political culture, and what is regionally influenced in the “living memory” of national history for people around the world? Selected data a reported from a massive multi-generational adult sample (N>27000) collected online in 2018-19, representative of 42 societies around the world). In […]

Courtney Meehan – The social worlds of infants, moms, and microbes

Courtney Meehan: Washington State University Throughout our evolutionary history, and in much of the world today, human infancy has been characterized by a host of ancestral traits which include frequent maternal-infant contact, on-demand breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and cooperative breeding. These ancestral characteristics have, in part, supported the development of our altricial infants and enabled reproductive success […]

Kotrina Kajokaite – Testing hypotheses about social cognition with observational data: coalitions in white-faced capuchin monkeys

Kotrina Kajokaite: University of California, Los AngelesCoalitionary recruitment offers a window into animal social cognition. However, naturally observed coalitionary conflicts are challenging to analyze because the researcher has no control over the context in which they occurred, and observed behavior patterns are typically consistent with multiple explanations. In this talk, I will present analyses of […]