THE ADAPT MISSION
The Advancing Diversity through Anthropological and Psychological Training (ADAPT) Program exists to give more students—from a broader range of backgrounds—access to high-quality training and hands-on research opportunities in Evolutionary Social Science.
The ADAPT Experience
ADAPT will provide financial, social, and professional support for undergraduate students. Students will receive remote, mentored research experiences with an HBES mentor, culminating in presentations at a special poster session at the summer conference. ADAPT also provides additional programming to prepare students for successful futures (e.g., programming basics, CV sessions, graduate school counseling).
Together with their mentors, students plan, design, conduct, and/or analyze data related to a research project designed with their mentor. Collection of new data is not necessary. Working with existing data and community-based field work are welcome and encouraged, as are well-powered studies using online or student samples or construction of computational or mathematical models. Students will typically be involved in broader lab activities in addition to the focal research project. Mentors must be active HBES members.
Priority will be given to students at home institutions where they are less able to access evolutionary social science research opportunities. HBES encourages students from all backgrounds (e.g., gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, immigrant status, national origin, nation of scholarship) to apply.
Brief Timeline
- Prospective mentors apply by February 1, 2025 (use the application form in the Prospective Mentors section)
- Students apply by June 1, 2025
- Awards are made before July 15, 2025
- Program runs from September, 2025 – May, 2026
- Students and mentors attend and present their research at HBES 2026
Prospective Students
Eligible students will be currently enrolled in college or recent graduates (within 2 years of graduation) who intend to apply to graduate programs.
Students winning ADAPT positions will engage in hands-on, remote mentored research experiences, receive $1,200 USD in funding to support their time in the program and up to $3,000 USD to support their travel to the summer HBES conference where they will meet their mentor in person and present their research in a special poster session.HBES is committed to financially covering student travel expenses (travel, lodging, and registration) up to $3,000 USD.
Priority will be given to students at institutions where they are less able to access social science research opportunities. Students from underrepresented minority and other under-served groups are encouraged to apply.
Students must commit to regular meetings with mentors and research labs as well as to taking part in additional monthly programming and attending the HBES conference to present their work.
To apply, students will be asked to identify one or more prospective mentors, provide a CV or resume, a short personal statement, and contact information for one reference, and complete short answers to several application questions.
Applications will be due on June 1, 2025.
Apply to be an ADAPT student here
If you are interested in applying to be a ADAPT Mentor, apply here
Prospective Mentors
2024-25 Mentors
Name: David Puts
University: Penn State
Lab: Behavioral Endocrinology and Evolution Lab
Research description.
Our research focuses on the evolution and development of human sexuality and sex differences. We are especially interested in how sex hormones influence our mating psychology, behavior, and anatomy—and how these traits were shaped by sexual selection. If you are a motivated student interested in some of these topics, we want to hear from you!
What would an ADAPT student work on in your lab?
Title: Sexual Selection and Endocrine Research on Faces, Voices, and other Characteristics in Human Females
Summary: An ADAPT student accepted to our lab would be able to work on one or both of two ongoing studies focusing on sexual selection and hormones in human females.
Study 1 addresses a major gap in the literature on sexual selection in human females. Various traits, including psychological and behavioral characteristics, as well as body shape, faces and voices, have been proposed to be targets of ancestral selection selection operating on human females. However, little information exists on the relative contributions of such features to female mating success. This study adopts methods and analytical approaches from our past work on sexual selection in males (Hill et al. 2013 Evol Hum Behav https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.05.004), plus new approaches, to measure female traits and explore their influence on components of mating success. Students working on this study will learn multiple skills, including social network analysis, acoustic measurement of voices, and face shape measurement from 3D images.
Study 2 explores female anatomical, behavioral, and psychological phenotypes across the ovulatory cycle as a function of ovarian hormones. A limitation of past research on this rapidly-growing topic is the collection of a limited number of samples (usually 2 or 4) across the ovulatory cycle, prohibiting the discovery of acute patterns of change. In this study, research participants provide daily hormone and phenotype data for at least one cycle. Students working on this study will learn multiple skills related to hormone sample processing and analysis, oral microbiome analysis, psychometrics, and acoustic measurement of voices, and face shape measurement from 3D images.
Name: Siobhan Mattison
University: University of New Mexico
Lab : Human Family and Evolutionary Demography Lab
Research description.
Siobhán Mattison is a Disabled mother of two and an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She was a rotator in the Cultural Anthropology (and numerous other) Program(s) at the National Science Foundation, supporting work related to social and biological sciences aimed at broadening knowledge and participation. Her current projects use mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) to understand the effects of family and social structure on individual and population health. She works in Vanuatu and China, and consults on projects in Africa, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world. She is especially interested in projects and students that increase diversity of thought and participants generating thought. She would welcome work that arises in partnership with local communities.
What would an ADAPT student work on in your lab?
I have numerous projects that could involve students, including data drawn from fieldwork in China, from fieldwork in Vanuatu, and from historical household registers in Taiwan. The data are intended to address how gender and family structure (e.g., adoption) relate to health and human activity. There is the potential for mentored field experiences for the student and I’d be happy to mentor independent projects.
Name: Nicholas Grebe
University: Occidental College
Lab name: Comparative Behavioral Endocrinology Lab
Research description.
Hello! I’m beginning a new lab at Occidental, a liberal arts college, in the Fall of 2024, which means my research program is already geared towards directly involving undergraduate students who have an interest in the evolutionary social sciences. When I was a student, I was lucky enough to have advisors who gave me the freedom to explore my broad interests, and I plan on continuing that as an ADAPT mentor. The common core of my research is the interplay between the endocrine system and social behavior, but we could explore this huge, huge topic through a number of different routes. I have experience conducting studies on both humans and non-human primates, and I work with both newly collected and archival data.
Working with data that are already collected can be helpful for remote collaboration–I’ve published meta-analyses and secondary data analyses on hormonal patterns across the human lifespan, and I also partner with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to analyze their long-term field data on mountain gorilla physiology and behavior. I’d be excited to work on projects with an ADAPT trainee that build on these kinds of data sources.
I’m also a big proponent of the open science movement, for a number of reasons, including its ‘big tent’ approach that allows for researchers from diverse career stages and/or institutions to directly contribute to large-scale research. For one example of a group I’ve worked with, see the ManyPrimates consortium. This group is very active in collaborative ‘open science’ research on primate behavior, and I think an ADAPT trainee would learn a lot about forward-thinking research methods and comparative psychology by participating in a ManyPrimates project.
Finally, I’m also interested in starting new research projects, focused on human participants, that seek to provide a detailed picture of how different formulations of hormonal contraceptives might lead to different downstream impacts on women’s behavior and social relationships. It would be great to directly work with an ADAPT trainee to design a study in this vein.
These are just a few examples of potential projects. I encourage applicants to reach out directly if they have ideas/questions of their own.
What would an ADAPT student work on in your lab?
I will be starting my lab at a liberal arts school (Occidental College) in Fall 2024. This means I am already focused on and intentional about building a portfolio of research conducive to hands-on involvement from undergraduates. Some of these projects, along with skills likely to be gained from working on them, include:
- Analyses of archival data on mountain gorilla behavior, social structure, and physiology collected by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (students will gain valuable experience in data cleaning/wrangling, general R coding skills, and working with intensive longitudinal data from wild animals)
- Collaboration and participation in forthcoming projects under the “ManyPrimates” umbrella–this is the best-established ‘team science’ consortia in comparative psychology and primatology that has multiple projects underway / formally published (students will gain exposure to open science practices such as interdisciplinary partnerships, pre-registration, and collaborative writing, and will have opportunities for authorship via various categories of contributions)
- Designing new surveys and experiments for online data collection from human participants–these projects would focus on the potential impacts of different formulations of hormonal birth control on women’s behavior relating to pair-bonding and mating effort (students will learn how to design surveys, gain ethical approval for human-participants research, and recruit participants)
Name: H. Clark Barrett
University: UCLA
Lab name: Barrett Lab
Research description.
I am a biological anthropologist specializing in evolutionary psychology, the study of the mind’s evolved mechanisms and processes. I use methods from anthropology and cognitive science to examine similarities and differences in how people conceptualize and think about minds, bodies, social processes, and the ethics of everyday life. In my research I collaborate with Shuar and Achuar communities in Ecuador and conduct multi-site research with collaborators around the world. My work has examined diverse topics including social learning about danger, theory of mind, afterlife beliefs, ownership, conceptualizations of lying, cooperative decision-making, moral judgment, and the ethics of evolutionary research. My most recent project, the Geography of Philosophy Project, is a multi-site collaboration with researchers in over a dozen countries that examines concepts of knowledge, wisdom and understanding around the world, putting Indigenous epistemologies into critical dialogue with literatures in philosophy and cognitive science. If you are potential ADAPT mentee interested in any of these topics and would like to find out more, please get in touch!
What would an ADAPT student work on in your lab?
ADAPT students in my lab could work on developing their own project that dovetails with current projects. In addition, ongoing projects that ADAPT students could be a part of include:
- The role of mental states and situational context in moral judgment: A debate currently exists about how and when people’s moral judgments take into account others’ mental states, including their goals, intentions, knowledge, emotions, and motivations, and how much moral judgments are influenced by the immediate situational context of the act being judged, as well as cultural and other social factors. ADAPT students could play a role in designing and carrying out empirical studies on moral judgment.
- Bringing Indigenous epistemologies and ethics into evolutionary and cognitive approaches to knowledge: My recent collaborative project, the Geography of Philosophy Project, examined Indigenous perspectives on knowledge, wisdom, and understanding around the world, bringing them into dialogue with formal, academic approaches to knowledge in philosophy and cognitive science. This project has uncovered multiple ways in which Indigenous approaches to knowledge could enrich and in some cases challenge academic treatments of what knowledge is, including in evolutionary social science, and inform discussions of responsibilities individuals and communities have towards knowledge. ADAPT students could play a role in helping to develop empirical projects to assess aspects of Indigenous epistemologies that promise to broaden and make more precise how knowledge is theorized in evolutionary and cognitive science.
- Ethics in evolutionary science: A recent thread of my research develops and applies the concepts of epistemic and ethical risk to evolutionary work. Because evolutionary explanations of ourselves have unique power due to their explanatory depth, this increases the stakes of getting them wrong, both in terms of the effects of wrong explanations on future science and the public sphere, and potential harms these false explanations might cause. In my lab, we are beginning to develop empirical studies of epistemic and ethical risk in evolutionary science. ADAPT students could help in conceptualizing, developing, and carrying out these studies.
Name: Patrick Durkee
University: California State University, Fresno
Website: pdurkee.com
Research description.
My research aims to understand the evolved psychological mechanisms that underpin variation in broad personality traits.
What would an ADAPT student work on in your lab?
Students can expect to study individual differences in the functioning of evolved psychological mechanisms, such as emotions (e.g., pride, anger, shame) and assessment systems (e.g., formidability, status-impact, and mate-value assessment), to better understand the nature of personality dimensions derived from the lexical tradition (e.g., Big Five, HEXACO). Students with a variety of interests will have the opportunity to develop hypotheses and design studies in accordance with this broad aim. Students can also work with existing datasets that I have collected. I prioritize teaching students about open science practices and helping them to develop skills necessary to contribute to reproducibility in the social sciences. Feel free to contact me with any questions!
2024-25 Students
Adam Daly is an Irish psychology student at Dublin City University. Over the last three years, he has worked on several research projects, with research interests including body modification, identity, health, and culture. Adam is mentored by anthropologist Dr. Siobhán Mattison (University of New Mexico).
Maria Hand is a junior at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana seeking a major in psychology and a minor in Hispanic studies. Her research interests focus on female mate selection as well as the behavior of queer individuals and those using modern reproductive technology, within the context of evolutionary psychology. Maria is mentored by David Puts (Pennsylvania State University)
CONTACT
If you have questions about ADAPT, please contact Jaimie Krems (jaimie.krems@ucla.edu), Dan Conroy-Beam (dconroybeam@ucsb.edu), or HBES President Clark Barrett (barrett@anthro.ucla.edu)
Jaimie Arona Krems is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UCLA, co-founder of the Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis (OCEAN), and co-creator of ADAPT. Krems investigates the ways that people maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of their social relationships. Much of this work focuses on (a) identifying the challenges that people have recurrently faced to find, make, and keep friends and that women have recurrently faced in navigating their social words (friendly and otherwise). Using a combination of in-lab experiments, cross-cultural surveys, agent-based models, and archival data analysis, Krems (b) explores the cognitive and behavioral solutions for these challenges.
Jaimie is a co-creator of ADAPT and member of the ADAPT advisory board.
Daniel Conroy-Beam is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UCSB and co-creator of ADAPT. Conroy-Beam uses an evolutionary and computational perspective to understand social decision making, primarily in the domain of mate choice. His work combines agent-based modeling with real-world behavioral data to study how people evaluate potential mates, navigate dynamic mating markets, and manage their romantic relationships.
Dan is a co-creator of ADAPT and member of the ADAPT advisory board.
Clark Barrett is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Director of the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture. He studies the evolution of cognition and the developmental and social processes that shape it. His work current focuses on moral judgment, theory of mind, how people conceptualize knowledge and the responsibilities that come with it, and the role that these play in the scientific process. He works with Indigenous communities in South America, and is interested in how Indigenous epistemologies and values can inform scientific practices and theory building in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences.
Clark is current President of HBES, and is a member of the ADAPT advisory board. He is available to serve as an ADAPT mentor, and is also available to answer any questions about the program at barrett@anthro.ucla.edu
David Pietraszewski is an Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work integrates social, developmental, cognitive, and evolutionary approaches to psychology. His empirical work focuses on social categorization procedures in the mind for assigning agents to groups. His theoretical work involves creating mechanistic (or computational) theories of social phenomena, including groups in conflict, using principles of adaptationism.
David is the Scientific Content Coordinator for ADAPT, responsible for the creation and curation of scientific training materials for enrollees in the ADAPT program. He also currently occupies one of the lead mentorship roles in ADAPT, meeting with enrollees in the program on a monthly basis.
Dani Grant is a 6th-year Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado Boulder studying human cooperation. Her research areas of interest include (a) how people find, initiate, and maintain friendships (b) how gratitude functions as a social emotion, and (c) social decision-making related to political division, media influence, and sacrificing for the well-being of the greater community.
Dani is the graduate student coordinator for the ADAPT Program.
