Department of Anthropology, UCL, London

Ruth Mace leads The Human Evolutionary Ecology Group, located in the Department of Anthropology at UCL.  Ruth got her Phd in Zoology from the University of Oxford. In 2008 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy.  She studies human behavior and life history as adaptations to local environments – which includes not only human behavioral ecology but also evolutionary demography and cultural evolution. Her particular areas of interest include human reproductive scheduling and life history, patterns of parental investment, the origins of human marriage and kinship systems, cultural phylogenetics and the evolution of social institutions, and the evolutionary ecology of co-operation. Ruth currently also holds a visiting Professorship at Lanzhou University in China, where she has been working on the behavioral ecology of various Sino-Tibetan populations.