My research interests

I am an evolutionary anthropologist in the broad sense, with interests in primatology, functional morphology, evolutionary biology, biogeography, ecology, palaeontology and human origins. My work applies an evolutionary perspective and focuses on unpicking the complex relationships between different aspects of and actors in evolutionary systems. I am working on two main projects at present, one using morphometrics to explore the evolution of primate locomotion and another applying niche modelling to gain a better understanding of primate distributions, ecology and landscape use. Both have an evolutionary flavour to them, and ultimately I hope to use the insights gained from these and related projects to help reconstruct human evolution.

In addition to my primary work on evolutionary anthropology and primatology, I am also interested in the anthropology of science and how humans learn, teach, conduct research and communicate their work. This has produced a co-authored book called The Behavioural Ecology of Project-Based Science and remains ongoing.

Current projects and funding

I am currently involved in a funded educational development project:

June 2024 - June 2025: An Educational Developer's Guide to Multimodal Learning and Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence). This project is funded by a SEDA small grant awarded to our team leaders, Dr Tunde Varga-Atkins and Dr Samuel Saunders.

In January - July 2024 I was also involved in an Advance HE Collaborative Development Fund project called EdD CoP - Educational Development Communities of Practice. Our team was led by Dr Cassie Lowe and Dr Helen Morley and produced the Advance HE Teaching and Learning Communities of Practice Toolkit (published November 2024).

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: 01248 38 8859

Office location: Wheldon Building, room 104

School roles: Director of Equality and Diversity