Bret A. Beheim

I am currently worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Tsimane Health and Life History project, run jointly between the University of New Mexico and UC Santa Barbara. I recently completed my doctoral dissertation at UC Davis, working with Pete Richerson, Richard McElreath and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder.  I am also a member of the Cultural Evolution Lab group. Ryan Baldini and I have recently developed an extension of the Price equation for human cultural systems we call “evolutionary decomposition”, inspired by the recent biodemography work of Tim Coulson and Shripad Tuljapurkar. Together with Adrian Bell, I have traced the historic spread of Polynesian canoe technology, focusing specifically on the environmental and historical antecedents of particular canoe designs. Working with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder I have done survival analysis work on data from East African agriculturalists, which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2009. I have conducted field interviews in various locations in California’s Central Valley for a project on the perceptions and interpretations of sustainability, on a project with Mark Lubell in the Environmental Science and Policy program.  This research, mostly qualitative, was used in a UC Davis white paper on sustainability and development.