I serve as Director of the Sports Sciences and Human Behavior Lab and specialize in Biomedical Anthropology. My cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research program uses naturalistic field study designs, such as sports, as proxies for aggression and psychobiological stress across cultural contexts. 

I investigate how children's and adults' physiological responses differ from and parallel one another to social and physical challenges.

Testosterone, estrogens, and cortisol are associated with energy mobilization, aggression, and stress in adult humans and non-human animals. Children are also competitive, yet their gonads have not yet been activated to produce high levels of primary sex steroids (e.g., testosterone, estrogen).

Thus, I am interested in understanding how hormone mediators underpin competitive behavior and regulate physical and psychological stress during childhood development and how these evolved physiological responses shift across the life course.  

To address these questions, I collect and evaluate adrenal hormones in saliva during social challenges, such as soccer (physical), eSports, and academic competitions (nonphysical). I designed quasi-experimental studies in Hong Kong and the USA to investigate how competition affects hormone changes and variation during in-group and out-group competition, and how these responses relate to individual and team performance measures.

The second thread of my interdisciplinary foci emphasizes method and theory in applied biomedical anthropology. I am interested in how different inputs (e.g., ecological factors, socioeconomic status, stress) affect the timing of pubertal maturation and adrenarche. 

I have also worked as an Applied Medical and Behavioral Scientist at Simply Rational GmbH – The Decision Institute, a spin-off of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. We partner with some of the world's largest medical device and biotech companies to evaluate the most effective, evidence-based clinical treatments for patients. We then identify decision-making asymmetries across German, US, and Canadian healthcare markets and design intervention strategies to deliver the most effective long-term treatments to patients, neurologists, and orthopedic surgeons. 

PRESS (2024): https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/evolutionary-biology-explains-why-we-make-bad-long-term-decisions/