I am a classically trained biologist, but I've always been fascinated by languages, and I got my start in evolutionary modeling by working as an undergraduate in a historical linguistics lab on a project researching ethnobiological systems in hunter-gatherer languages. Since then, I have from time to time collaborated with anthropologists and linguists on ways to apply quantitative methods developed in evolutionary biology to model the tree-like history of human linguistic and cultural diversity.

For example, you can use phylogenetic comparative methods to study the ways people talk about their grandparents in Pama-Nyungan (Australian) languages or study how fast Indo-European speakers tend to adopt new words for family members; you can also use causal graphs to understand the field of language evolution. I also contributed a bunch of Pama-Nyungan data (and many other bits and bobs) to the Kinbank project, if you like playing with large amounts of standardized language data and/or want to see a picture of me with long hair.

I'm currently thinking a lot about linguistic ethno-ornithology, but I'm always keen to collaborate or supervise students interested more broadly in applying phylogenetic comparative methods to questions in cultural evolution, particularly in Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages.

A phylogeny of Pama-Nyungan kinship systems, from Sheard & Jordan 2022, in response to Keen 2022 Current Anthropology