SciComm

The team at PRX/GBH’s The World reached out to Anne for an interview after reading Anne and collaborator Bonface Osindi’s science communication piece in The Conversation focused on how heat may be affecting herders’ health in Kenya, the US, and around the globe.

There are shepherds on the open range in the US who may see other people only once every few weeks. It’s difficult for medical professionals to serve them, much less for public health researchers to study them. As extreme heat gets more common, how could it be affecting herders’ health?

2025 was a rough year for federal workers. But here’s what most people don’t see: workers are building remarkably resilient networks of mutual support. In The Conversation, federal workers shared their stories with Anne, revealing what makes these networks work and practical lessons for anyone navigating uncertain times.

Anne was a guest on Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast), where she talked with Dave and David about what makes a group, what predicts intergroup animosity, and how to change intergroup dynamics - with examples from Bolivia and East Africa along the way.

As a guest opinion columnist for The Times-Tribune, Anne spoke directly to Pennsylvanians, highlighting how federal funding can support stewardship of our rivers and lakes in ways that might surprise people. She also talked about how much US taxpayers stand to lose from the cuts proposed in the One Big Beautiful Bill – not only smart, science-backed stewardship, but our returns on investment.

Following release of her paper with Cody Ross in Evolutionary Human Sciences, Anne spoke with Penn State science communicator Fracisco Tutella about how us vs them mindsets are common but not inevitable. She identified common ingredients to us vs them thinking, like differential resource access, what other people say, and past experience, and small ways each of us can tackle us vs them behavior through local action.

WSU and Penn State covered a Conservation Letters paper by Kris, Anne, and Tanzanian and international collaborators: Having any friendship with someone in a nearby village makes someone more likely to participate in fisheries management, including reporting violators, cleaning up the beach, and educating others. See here for the releases from Washington State and Penn State.

Anne represented biological anthropology as a speaker and panelist for Michigan Anthropology’s annual Four-Field Symposium in 2024, focused on sustainability. The resulting conversation focused on locally led adaptation, community engagement, and who gets to decide what counts as sustainable. The talks and panel discussion, including lots of insights for students, are available here.

In a blog post riffing off of their article with lab alum Eric Hubbard in Evolution & Human Behavior, Ollie and Anne write that chosen kin – non-kin, to evolutionary scientists – are often central to human social networks and to cooperative childrearing, though they’re understudied. Though godparents don’t have measurable impacts on educational attainment in rural Bolivia, as Eric, Ollie, and Anne predicted in the paper, they do play other key roles. Ollie and Anne close by suggesting that studying chosen kin helps “honor the resilience and diversity of human social bonds.”

In a blog post riffing off of her article with Cody Ross in Evolution & Human Behavior, Anne writes that intergroup relationships are profoundly flexible in humans, ranging from highly aggressive to highly tolerant. That said, our experiences shape which end of the distribution we expect, and scientists haven’t been doing a great job at documenting variation in intergroup behavior partially because scientists’ own expectations influence what scientists study. Anne outlines ways forward, including diversifying the sciences and improving methodological design.