Robert Kurzban Gets Award for Early Career Achievements
March 2008
Assistant professor of psychology Robert Kurzban was named the inaugural winner of the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Human Behavior and Evolution. The new award is given by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society for outstanding contributions to the study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective by someone who received the Ph.D. ten or fewer years before. The letter nominating Kurzban for the award noted that his research “attacks important questions in conceptually elegant and empirically rigorous ways, integrating the best of evolutionary theory with social psychology, cognitive science and experimental economics.”
Kurzban received his Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara. After finishing is doctorate, he took a postdoctoral position at the Economic Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona. He subsequently took a postdoc that was shared between the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and the Anthropology Department at UCLA. His research focuses on evolutionary approaches to social phenomena such as cooperation, trust, mating, friendship and social networks.
The Human Behavior and Evolution Society is an interdisciplinary, international society of researchers, primarily from the social and biological sciences, who use modern evolutionary theory to help to discover human nature – including evolved emotional, cognitive and sexual adaptations.