Anne Kandler
Senior Scientist
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture
Deutscher Platz 6 04103 Leipzig
Phone: +49 341 3550 307
Email: anne_kandler@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de
Office: level 1, room u1.16
I am an applied mathematician interested in the underlying principles of cultural change especially in changing environmental conditions. Cultural change is often expressed by frequency changes of cultural traits, i.e. behaviour learnt socially, within and across populations. Social learning, however, can occur in a large variety of ways and my research aims at establishing why certain learning mechanisms evolved and in which situations they are expected to be present. In particular I am interested in bridging theoretical and empirical work in cultural evolution and focus on understanding the limits of inferability of underlying evolutionary processes from population-level data. I explore the question of how much information about social learning mechanisms is contained in observed frequency distributions describing a specific episode of cultural change. To do so I develop simulation and statistical inference methods to create frameworks for analysing cultural change accounting for the problem of equifinality.
Curriculum Vitae
Education and Employment
2016-present | Senior Scientist Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig, Germany |
2012-2016 | Lecturer (Assistant Professor) Department of Mathematics City, University of London, UK |
2010-2012 | Omidyar Postdoctoral Research Fellow Santa Fe Institute, USA |
2008-2010 | Leverhulme Trust Early Career Postdoctoral Research Fellow UCL Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, UK (with James Steele) |
2006-2008 | Postdoctoral Research Associate UCL Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, UK (with James Steele and Kevin Laland) |
2006 | PhD in Applied Mathematics “Parabolic initial boundary value problems with random boundary and initial conditions” University of Technology Chemnitz, Germany |
2001 | Diploma in Mathematics and Business University of Technology Chemnitz, Germany |
Grant and Awards
2014 | LMS New Lecturer conference grant |
2012 | NSF EAGER grant “Linking Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution” together with Laura Fortunato (Santa Fe Institute) |
2010 | Gabriel W. Lasker Prize for the paper “Demography and language competition” (awarded by Human Biology for the best article published in 2009) |
2010 | Omidyar Fellowship (Santa Fe Institute) |
2008 | Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship |