Laura Fortunato
External Professor
Laura's research aims to understand the evolution of human social and cultural behaviour, working at the interface of biology and anthropology. Three areas of ongoing research are the evolution of human family systems, the study of how culture changes over time, and the emergence of cooperation and complexity in human social systems.
Her work combines theoretical and statistical methods developed in biology with theory and data drawn from the historical and social sciences. She holds a Laurea in biological sciences from the University of Padova and an MRes and PhD in anthropology from University College London. Since September 2013 she has been based at the University of Oxford, as Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Tutorial Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.