1. Studying childhood learning across cultures

Dorsa Amir received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, US. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University and the Director of the Mind & Culture Lab. Dorsa’s work focuses on cognitive development across diverse cultures, with a particular focus on judgement and decision-making.

Feryl Badiani is a final year PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is also affiliated with the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University of London, UK. Her thesis explores Hinduism and the cultural evolutionary explanations as to why it is a popular polytheistic religion. She focuses on two Indo-linguistic communities: Gujarats and Maharashtrians, as a member of both those communities. Her work looks at expanding theories within cognitive science of religion so that they take into account non-western realities.

Michelle Kline is a Senior Lecturer of Psychology at Brunel University of London, UK. Her work focuses on social learning, including the evolution of teaching, how people learn to be parents, and the learning and creation of present-day spiritual beliefs. Her f ieldwork has included research in the Yasawa Islands, Fiji and in the town of Glastonbury, England.

Nokwanda (Kwanda) Ndlovu is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at Purdue University and she is from Durban, South Africa. Her passion lies in decolonized community work where she collaborates with community-based organizations particularly in South Africa, and leverages community assets and strengths to address issues faced by vulnerable children and families. Through that lens, Kwanda’s past research has looked into Indigenous parenting values, traditions, and mores within the context of South Africa. Most recently, Kwanda has been studying systems of healing as conceptualized by traditional healers within the South African context.

Sarah Pope-Caldwell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, USA. Sarah’s research focuses on cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, and decision-making, with a strong emphasis on how these processes are shaped by cultural environments and experiences across the lifespan. She explores these areas through a cross-cultural lens, incorporating research from communities around the world, including the United States, Namibia, Germany, and the Republic of the Congo. Additionally, Sarah studies nonhuman primates like baboons, chimpanzees, rhesus macaques, and capuchin monkeys to understand the evolution of flexible problem-solving.

Bruce Rawlings is a developmental, cross-cultural and comparative psychologist, based at Durham University, UK. He holds a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from the same university. His work examines cognitive and cultural influences on innovation, creativity, and tool use in children and great apes. He focuses on children across geographically and culturally diverse populations to understand what makes humans so unique. He also works to improve the validity of cross-cultural experiments

Nachita Rosun is a postdoctoral researcher in Psychology at Oxford Brookes University, UK, and an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University of London. Nachita is interested in processes of cultural shift through changing social norms and religious beliefs. Her research uses theories from cultural evolution and norm psychology to explain how these changes are interlinked with socioecology and cultural transmission mechanisms.

Nicole Wen is Lecturer in Psychology at Brunel University of London, UK, in the Centre for Culture and Evolution, and Director of the Culture and Minds Lab. Nicole received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Nicole studies the ontogeny of social learning strategies and cooperative behaviors within and across cultures, with a focus on the development of rituals.