Russell Gray | |
|---|---|
| Born | Russell David Gray |
| Nationality | New Zealand |
| Occupation | Scientist |
| Academic background | |
| Thesis | Design, constraint and construction: Essays and experiments on evolution and foraging (1990) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Craig and Michael Davison |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History |
| Doctoral students | Simon Greenhill |
| Main interests | Evolution,computational phylogenetics |
Russell David Gray is a New Zealand evolutionary biologist and psychologist working on applying quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. In 2020, he became a co-director of theMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology inLeipzig.[1] Although originally trained inbiology andpsychology, Gray has become well known for his studies on the evolution of theIndo-European andAustronesian language families usingcomputational phylogenetic methods.
Gray also performs research on animal cognition. One of his main research-projects studies the use of tools amongNew Caledonian crows.
Gray completed hisPh.D. at theUniversity of Auckland in 1990.[2] He spent four years lecturing at theUniversity of Otago, New Zealand, before returning to the School of Psychology at theUniversity of Auckland. He is a Fellow of theRoyal Society of New Zealand and has been awarded with several fellowships, as well as the inauguralMason Durie Medal (in 2012) for his pioneering contributions to social science.[3] In 2014, he became one of the two founding directors of theMax Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, where he has been heading the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution [until it moved to Leipzig in 2020]. He also holds adjunct positions in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland and the Department of Philosophy at theAustralian National University.[1]
Gray's doctoral thesis was titledDesign, constraint and construction: essays and experiments on evolution and foraging.[4]
Notable students of Gray includeSimon Greenhill.[5]
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