Matt Zimmerman

I'm in the Graduate Group in Ecology at UC Davis and a member of the a member of the Cultural Evolution Laboratory. My undergraduate was in engineering and I spent six years as an engineering officer in the United States Air Force with some time in the UAE and Afghanistan. This will be my first time in China.

I'm interested in understanding the emergence of human behavior and institutions through analytical and computational models of cultural evolution. I am specifically interested in how transmission strategies and biases evolve in cultural systems and how humans behaviorally adapt to changing environmental conditions. The theoretical framework for these efforts is dual inheritance theory, which has a 30-year tradition of analytically modeling how human evolution has been shaped by the coevolutionary interaction between genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Since this coevolutionary process often results in complex dynamics, I hope to adapt computational modeling techniques to this analytical framework. I also tinker with evolutionary game theoretic models and behavioral ecology.

I swim and run to try to keep fit. In moments of triathlete envy, I add cycling to the mix. My little sister and I are planning to do the Alcatraz Challenge in August and I'm also thinking about doing another marathon, so I'll probably be looking for workout partners in Beijing.

mrz1 at ucdavis edu