The idea that evolution shaped human behavioral tendencies first began to fascinate me during casual bull sessions at Taos coop, where I lived while attending the University of Texas in Austin. I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, and knowing little about either evolution (given short shrift by the biology teacher, a creationist, at my high school) or psychology, I thought I had stumbled upon a new way of thinking about human behavior. I hadn’t, of course; evolutionary psychology had been going strong for at least twenty years in academia. Fortunately, UT was one of only a handful of universities at the time who had professors - specifically, Dev Singh,  Del Thiessen, and David Buss - in the field. Thanks largely to these three professors, I left UT in 1995 not just with a degree in psychology, but also with a passion for studying the evolutionary roots of human behavior.

I attended graduate school (in social psychology and statistics) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor between 1998 and 2004. I was supported during my graduate career with a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. My primary advisor was Randolph Nesse, a founder of Darwinian Medicine and to whom I owe an enormous intellectual debt. I also had the pleasure of working with psychologists Oscar Ybarra and Barbara Fredrickson. My PhD dissertation regarded the possible evolutionary functions of depressive symptoms. Like fever and pain - both unpleasant yet nevertheless adaptive reactions - depressive symptoms (e.g., fatigue, crying, sadness) may be adaptive reactions crafted by natural selection to deal with difficult situations. There was no claim that major depressive disorder (i.e., severe and protracted depressive symptoms) is adaptive, only that the symptoms of depression, expressed in the appropriate contexts and at normal levels, served functions in ancestral environments.

In trying to understand the evolutionary origins of mental disorders, it became evident that half the picture would be missed without tackling the issue of genetics. After graduating from UM, I completed a four-month research fellowship in Genetic Epidemiology at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, working with Nick Martin and an eight-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA, where I worked in the lab of Tyrone Cannon. In July 2005, I began a two year fellowship at the Virginia Institute of Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics working with Michael Neale, Lindon Eaves, and Kenneth Kendler. In the summer of 2007, I began as an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Behavioral Genetics area.

My long-term interests are in using models from evolutionary genetics to help understand the origins of alleles that cause differences in traits related to Darwinian fitness and, in particular, to mental disorders. The motivating question is: What accounts for the high prevalence of alleles that predispose to common mental disorders, especially to the degree that these mental disorders existed in ancestral environments and decreased Darwinian fitness? Geoffrey Miller and I recently had a target article published in Brain and Behavioral Sciences on this topic. In addition, I am interested in developing new behavioral genetic models that can help us better estimate causes of interpersonal differences. I have also conducted projects on statistical methods in fMRI research, the evolution of social intelligence, the effects of weather on mood and cognition (which has generated a surprising amount of interest in the press), and evolutionary theories of parental investment (see Publications ).

I look forward to the next stage in my career. As a junior faculty member, I will strive to be as good of a mentor as those I have been lucky enough to work under during my graduate school and postdoc years. I have very big shoes to fill!

My dissertation committee: Oscar Ybarra, Barbara Fredrickson, (me), and Randolph Nesse