About me

I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology, focusing on Human Evolutionary Ecology, from the University of New Mexico in 1998. I followed that with at three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Social Research‘s Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, before relocating to the University of Oklahoma‘s Department of Anthropology in 2002. I was in a non-tenure track position for about a dozen years, but I have recently received tenure!

My dissertation research took place in the township of Guguletu in Cape Town, South Africa. I was interested in the interactions between fathers and father figures and their children, and I focused on students in a township high school. As part of my postdoc, I helped design and implement the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a longitudinal survey sampling youth and young adults in the metropolitan Cape Town area, working with colleagues at the University of Cape Town. While I was still interested in educational outcomes, my interests expanded to include HIV/AIDS knowledge and risk behaviors.

Since relocating to Oklahoma, I have continued my interest in Cape Town, but have expanded my focus to include HIV/AIDS in various American communities, and more recently weight gain, diabetes, and pregnancy outcomes among Native Americans. I am also doing work on surgical disparities in voluntary sterilization (i.e., tubal ligation and vasectomy), and on male care among non-human primates. Most recently I am working (with Mary Towner of Oklahoma State University) on an NSF-funded project looking at the effects of migration on marriage, fertility, and child survival, using data from the 1910 US Census.

In 2010 Harvard University Press published my book, co-authored with Peter Gray, Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior.

 

Pictured above: fishing for termites, chimpanzee-style, in the Klein Karoo, South Africa.