The HSL is accepting PhD students at Penn State interested in evolutionary social science or applied evolutionary anthropology with a focus on climate change adaptation, understudied social relationships, or cooperation and natural resource management. Students will join the fully funded PhD program at Penn State Anthropology, with options to join a dual degree program like Demography or Transdisciplinary Research on Environment and Society (TREES).
Training in the HSL emphasizes:
- Integration of theory and methods from across the social, behavioral, and ecological sciences, with evolutionary theory as a throughline
- Research at the interface of basic science and applied work, often in collaboration with communities, industry, nonprofit organizations, and government
- Preparation for research positions in academia, industry, government, and the nonprofit sector
- Field research - explicitly including fieldwork in the US and remote data collection (e.g., Zoom interviews)
- Mixed-method data collection (that is, both quantitative and qualitative methods) analyzed with cutting-edge statistics
We especially encourage applications from those interested in:
- Research in evolutionary social science and applied evolutionary anthropology
- Climate change adaptation and its effects on health and livelihoods
- Studying understudied social relationships, including long-distance relationships (in the social and behavioral sciences) and nonkin relationships (in evolutionary social science)
- Cooperation, including (but not limited to) collective action, common-pool resource problems, and social safety nets
The HSL is committed to collaborative, ethical, inclusive research and to open science practices. For more about our commitments and priorities, see our lab manual.