Brooke A. Scelza (Principal Investigator)
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I am a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. I received my PhD in Biocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington in 2008. My dissertation work was with the Martu in Western Australia. There I studied parental investment as children were making the transition to adulthood.
In 2009 I shifted my fieldwork to Namibia, where I began working with the Himba. My work there focuses on two main topics, the importance of mother-adult daughter relationships, and the role of "multiple mating" in men's and women's reproductive and parenting decisions. |
Major Collaborators
Sean Prall, PhD
Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Anthropology
Dr. Prall is a co-Director of the Kunene Rural Health and Demograhy Project, of which he has been a part since 2016. He received his PhD from the Indiana University in 2014. He brings to the project expertise in reproductive endocrinology and experience collecting physiological and behavioral data. He leads our current NSF-funded project on vaccine decision-making in Namibian communities across a rural to urban spectrum.
Brenna Henn, PhD
Associate Professor, UC Davis Department of Anthropology Dr. Henn is a population geneticist focused on sub-Saharan Africa. Her work with Himba focuses on understanding ancestry and family relationships from a genetic perspective. She has been involved with the project since 2014. |
Richard McElreath, PhD
Director, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture Dr. McElreath contributes statistical expertise to our project and has also brought the KRHDP under the umbrella of MPI-Evolutionary Anthropology as part of an endeavor to promote longitudinal fieldwork in the evolutionary social sciences. |
Helen Davis, PhD
Assistant Professor, Arizona State University Dr. Davis is an evolutionary anthropologist who works in northern Namibia and Angola on the effects of formal schooling shape learning content and processes. She also founded the One Pencil Project and actively works with communities in southern Africa and South America in community-engaged research. Our Field Team
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Graduate Students
Kasey Schleper (Current PhD student) Interests: birth, pregnancy and postpartum support
Renee Hagen (PhD, 2023) Interests: cultural evolution, reproductive decision-making and human behavioral ecology).
Sally Li (MA, 2023) Interests: life history theory, fertility and parental investment
