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 the

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (german: Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, shortened to MPI EVA) is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Plan ...

in Leipzig. Although originally trained in biology and psychology, Gray has become well known for his studies on the evolution of the Indo-European and Austronesian language families using computational phylogenetic methods. Gray also performs research on animal cognition. One of his main research-projects studies tool-use among

New Caledonian crows The New Caledonian crow (''Corvus moneduloides'') is a medium-sized member of the family Corvidae, native to New Caledonia. The bird is often referred to as the 'qua-qua' due to its distinctive call. It eats a wide range of food, including many ...

Career

Gray completed his Ph.D. at the University of Auckland in 1990. He spent four years lecturing at the University of Otago, New Zealand, before returning to the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has been awarded with several fellowships, as well as the inaugural Mason Durie Medal n 2012for his pioneering contributions to social science.[] In 2014, he became one of the two founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, where he has been heading the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution ntil 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 the Australian National University.

Gray's doctoral thesis was titled ''Design, constraint and construction: essays and experiments on evolution and foraging''.

References

External links

Official faculty page
;Video
Video on Russell Gray's research (Latest Thinking)
Evolutionary biologists Computational linguistics researchers Linguists of Austronesian languages University of Auckland faculty Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Phylogenetics researchers {{biologist-stub