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News

2025

• April 8: presented a talk, Biased decision-making in organisms and large language models, at the Society for Modeling and Theory in Population Biology SMTPBConnect Grad and Postdoc Research Showcase

• April 4: was the runner-up for the John Maynard Smith Prize from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology — see announcement here

• March 10-13: co-organized a Micro Working Group at the Santa Fe Institute, Populations on the brink: Robust estimation for optimal reintroduction ranges 

• March 3: presented an invited talk, Following the majority or the mean: Conformity in humans and large language models, at the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) Symposium at Stanford University

• February 18: presented a talk, Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits, at the Winter Quantitative Biology Conference in Oahu, Hawai'i, and chaired this morning's session

• January 29: visited Stanford University and gave a talk about my current research to Marc Feldman's lab

• January 17: the Santa Fe Institute published a news article about my research, New study offers insights into how populations conform or go against the crowd

• January 17: my paper with Elisa Heinrich Mora, Michael Palmer, and Marcus Feldman, Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits, was published in PNAS

2024

• September 11: presented a talk, Conditions that favour cumulative cultural evolution, at the Cultural Evolution Society Conference in Durham, UK 

• August 12: gave a Slice of Science presentation, Dimensionality reduction methods in population genetics, at the Santa Fe Institute 

• July 18: posted an arXiv preprint, Conformity to continuous and discrete ordinal traits (which was later published in PNAS as Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits) 

• July 1: began my Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI news article: SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton)

• May 27: completed Stanford's Postdoctoral Mentoring Certificate, Tier 1 

• May 24: presented an invited talk, Modelling constant and stochastically variable conformity, at the Banff International Research Station Workshop on Modeling and Theory in Population Biology

• April 1: my paper with Uri Liberman and Marcus Feldman, On random conformity bias in cultural transmission of polychotomous traits, was published in Theoretical Population Biology

• February 1: my paper with Peter Nonacs, Eusociality is not a major evolutionary transition, and why that matters, was published in Insectes Sociaux

2023

• October 1: my paper with Jeremy Kendal, Yasuo Ihara, and Marcus Feldman, Cultural niche construction with application to fertility control: A model for education and social transmission of contraceptive use, was published in Theoretical Population Biology in memory of Freddy Christiansen

• June 30: began my postdoctoral research in Marc Feldman's lab at Stanford University

• June 18: was awarded the Samuel Karlin Prize in Mathematical Biology for my PhD dissertation

• May 23: began co-instructing the mini-course Biosciences 213: Ecology and Evolution of Altruism with Talia Borofsky

• May 12: defended my PhD thesis, Evolutionary dynamics of conformity, at Stanford University

• April 7: my work with Egor Lappo and Marcus Feldman, Conformity and anti-conformity in a finite population, was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology

• March 13: my work with Yoav Ram and Marcus Feldman, Conditions that favour cumulative cultural evolution, was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B as part of the theme issue 'Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions'

• March 7: gave an invited talk, Evolutionary dynamics of conformity, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany