Dr Daniel Smith

By training I am an Evolutionary Anthropologist, interested in understanding human behaviour and adaptation from a evoutionary perspective. I completed a PhD at UCL (awarded June 2017) exploring cooperation among the Agta, a population of Filipino hunter-gatherers. This involved ten months of fieldwork in remote forests where I conducted behavioural experiments to explore how much individuals cooperated, who they cooperated with, and why. I am also interested in the ontogenetic roots of cooperation, the evolution of storytelling, and wider links between cooperation, life history theory and cultural evolution.

Since August 2016 I have been working at the University of Bristol for the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) in various roles - currently as a Data Pipeline Manager as Senior Research Associate in Epidemiology. This role requires processing, analysing, managing and documenting data from a unique three-generational resource, spanning nearly 30 years, investigating health and social issues in a Bristol-based cohort. I have been involved in ALSPAC-based projects exploring inter-generational differences in health and well-being (using the ALSPAC generation 2/COCOs data), using linkage data from routine GP records to investigate mental health in ALSPAC participants, and examining potential issues of selection bias in the ALSPAC COVID data. As a perk of my position, I have also undertaken research exploring topics in evolutionary anthropology using the ALSPAC dataset, such as the impact of sibling relatedness on reproductive development.