You can download my c.v. here.
I was born in 1975, and grew up near the New Forest, in the south of England. I studied Zoology at King's College, Cambridge. At the end of my second year there, I managed to arrange to spend the summer doing research on parasitoid foraging strategy with Bernie Roitberg at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, Canada. Back at Cambridge, lectures from Kevin Laland inspired me to think about doing a PhD on cultural evolution. I first carried out a project with Kevin investigating social learning in guppies, specifically how individuals decide who to follow.
The next stop was the University of St. Andrews, where I carried out my PhD under the supervision of Peter Slater. The project examined cultural evolution in chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) song. Despite chaffinches being one of the commonest bird species in Britain, I managed to come up with an excuse to do some of this research in the isolated Scottish islands of Orkney and Lewis, and the slightly sunnier Canary Islands. I also spent a summer collaborating with Marc Feldman at Stanford University, where I learned population genetics theory.
Following my PhD, I spent 2 years on a Marie Curie fellowship at Leiden University in the Netherlands, in the group of Carel ten Cate, following on from work started on chaffinch populations in the Canary Islands. Next, I spent a year and a half working at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Maria Servedio on speciation theory, bird song and cultural evolution. After a further spell in Leiden, working on commonalities between bird song and language, I am now back in North Carolina. But this time I'm at at the other end of the road, working in Steve Nowicki's group at Duke University on the interplay between sexual selection and cultural evolution.
When I was at Cambridge and St. Andrews, I spent a lot of time rowing... but was saved from a lifetime of rowing obsession by the fact that chaffinches only sing during the racing season for rowing. Since then I've spent more time hiking and cycling, and have recently started taking bad photographs of birds, and playing the guitar very poorly.