Charles' research focuses on the gene-culture coevolution of human social cognition and behavior in domains involving conformity, coordination, conflict, and cooperation. He routinely mixes evolutionary modeling with the analysis of both experimental and observational data. He has conducted fieldwork in Europe, Western Asia, Africa, and South America. Much of Charles' current empirical research examines the social psychological mechanisms underlying social norms and cultural traditions that harm women and girls. This research often has direct policy implications, and it has afforded him the opportunity to collaborate extensively with UNICEF, the World Bank, and various NGOs.

Sonja uses lab and field experiments to examine the social and psychological mechanisms needed for sustainable behavioral change in development. Current projects include corruption in higher education in Colombia and South Africa, reducing school drop-outs in Malawi, female genital cutting in Sudan, pre-natal sex selection in Armenia, and social learning in Kenya. Sonja's research is in collaboration with UN agencies and local NGO’s. She is affiliated with Nuffield College and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, as well as the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern.

Mirko received his PhD from the Graduate Institute Geneva, where he wrote his dissertation on the labeling of defectors in Palestine and East Germany during the Cold War.

He is interested in political behavior in social conflict, particularly  from a sociological perspective, drawing on experimental games,  computational modeling, archival research, and interviews. Previously, he worked on malnutrition in conflict-affected settings, and armed organizations in Syria and Guatemala.

Mirko is joining the PaceLab team as a postdoctoral researcher, where he will work on the diffusion of agricultural norms.

Sönke is a political scientist by training. He has worked on strategic political decision making and comparative political behavior, and has developed methods for online and computational experiments. He received his PhD from New York University in 2017, and was a Research Scientist at the University of Oxford from 2017-2019. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bern and HEC Lausanne. He is broadly interested in the capacity of individuals to make sophisticated political choices, the ability of leaders to sway groups, and in the relationship between motivated reasoning and knowledge representations. Sönke has recently started on a researcher position at the World Economic Forum.

Lisa is a Ph.D. student in Management at HEC Lausanne and is supervised by Charles Efferson. She holds an MSc in Accounting, Control, and Finance from HEC Lausanne.  She is interested in the evolution of human social cognition and behavior, along with applications related to human health and well-being. Lisa’s current research focuses on the link between culture and diet in Switzerland and the potential of applied cultural evolution to reverse harmful alcohol consumption.

Katelyn is a PhD candidate in economics at HEC Lausanne under the supervision of Charles Efferson. She holds a MSc in Economics from HEC Lausanne and a BSc in Actuarial Science from Florida State University. Her research interests include cultural evolution, the evolution of inequality, development economics, and climate change economics. Katelyn’s current research is part of a 4-year SNSF funded project on gene-culture coevolution.

Eva Marti is a PhD candidate at the Department of Strategy, Globalization and Society at the University of Lausanne. 
In the framework of the AgriPath project, she studies how intra-household decision-making processes affect access to digitally supported advisory services for smallholder farmers in Africa and South Asia. Before coming to Lausanne, she worked on impact evaluations in Latin America and Asia on issues such as gender, rural microfinance and adaptation to climate change for the World Bank, Innovations for Poverty Action as well as for the Center for Evaluation and Development in Mannheim.

Maria holds an MPhil in Human Evolutionary Studies from the University of Cambridge. She has previously studied the evolution of sociality and cooperation among BaYaka hunter-gatherers. She is interested in the dynamics of human social network structure and cultural evolution, in particular with regards to innovation, collective cognition and collective problem-solving. Maria is a PhD student at HEC Lausanne under the supervision of Charles Efferson.

Robin joined HEC Lausanne as a PhD student under the supervision of Charles Efferson after completing an interdisciplinary MSc combining psychology and economics from the London School of Economics. In his professional career, he has worked in Jordan, Uganda, London, and Zurich. His research interest lies in exploring social and economic behavior from a cultural evolutionary perspective. In Robin’s current work, he investigates when and how social learning can lead to (harmful) path dependencies in decision-making. In addition, this cultural evolutionary approach aims to inform the design and experimental testing of policy interventions in the field.

Lukas is a PhD student at the University of Lausanne and is co-supervised by Sonja Vogt and Charles Efferson. He received an MA in Economics from the University of Zürich. As a member of the PACE Lab, Lukas works on heterogeneity in social learning. He is part of a four-year research project funded by the SNF. The goal is to better understand the causes and forms of heterogeneity in social learning in the development context and its consequences on the aggregate level (e.g. diffusion of harmful cultural traditions). Further interests include the evolution of cooperation and the application of cultural evolution concepts to sustainability research.

Aysha’s current research is primarily on gene-culture coevolution.  She has conducted experimental studies to investigate how similarity modulates the ways in which we learn from others.  She also uses computational models to investigate the evolution of optimal decision making in both asocial and social contexts.  In particular, she studies how sexual selection may impact the perception of romantic relationships among men and women, surely one of the most fitness-relevant domains in which we find ourselves.  She is currently a PhD student in Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Nils is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Humans and  Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.  He is a behavioral scientist working on corruption, (un-)ethical behavior, social norms and more recently artificial intelligence. You can find more about his work below, on his CV, or via LinkedIn,  Twitter,  ResearchGate  or GoogleScholar. He is a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network and together with Matthew Stephenson and Christopher Starke hosts the KickBack – Global AntiCorruption Podcast.

Matthias is a PhD student in Economics at Brown University.  He is interested in political economy, long-run economic growth, and development, as well as the theory and empirics of cultural evolution. In his current research, Matthias studies affective partisan polarization, population aging and economic inequality, and son-biased fertility preferences.

Jamie is a DPhil student at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He is interested in the social and psychological foundations of human agency.  He is affiliated with the Centre for Experimental Social Science at Nuffield, Centre for the Study of African Economies, and the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bern. He has also worked with the World Bank since 2013, and in addition to his academic work he provides support to the World Bank’s Behavioral Science Unit (eMBeD) on projects in Lebanon and Iraq. He spends most of his time engaging in diagnostic work to understand policy problems, creating behavioral interventions to solve those policy problems, and designing field experiments to test the effectiveness of those interventions.