Richard McElreath

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Richard McElreath
Born (1973-04-18) 18 April 1973 (age 50)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Emory University (BS)
University of California, Los Angeles (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields Evolutionary anthropology
Institutions Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Thesis Culture and ecology of Usangu, Tanzania  (2001)
Doctoral advisor Robert Boyd
Website xcelab.net/rm/

Richard McElreath (born 18 April 1973) is an American professor of anthropology and a director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. [1] [2] He is an author of the Statistical Rethinking applied Bayesian statistics textbook, among the first to largely rely on the Stan statistical environment, and the accompanying rethinking R language package. [3] [4]

Contents

He earned his B.S. at Emory University in 1995 and a Ph.D. in anthropology under Robert Boyd at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001 with field research in Tanzania. [5] [6] [7]

Research

In 2001 to 2002 McElreath won a fellowship to work as a postdoctoral researcher studying bounded rationality at the Max Planck Institute under Gerd Gigerenzer. Since 2002 he is working for the University of California, Davis, teaching anthropology and conducting field work. He was awarded tenure (2006) and promoted to full professor (2014), holding the chair of the Evolutionary Anthropology department from 2014 to 2015. Since 2015 he is one of the directors at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [5]

His main research focus lies in the evolution of cultural behaviors. Expanding on his work in anthropology, he has also been researching the social dynamics of the replication crisis in science and contributing to statistical education. [8] [9] His work has been covered by professional and popular media, e.g. in Nature, [10] The Economist [11] Pacific Standard, [1] and The Atlantic. [12]

Selected publications

Books

Articles and chapters

See also

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. 1 2 Chawla, Dalmeet Singh (June 5, 2018). "Can Auditing Scientific Research Help Fix Its Reproducibility Crisis?". Pacific Standard. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  2. Sample, Presented by Ian; Ferrari, produced by Sandra (March 30, 2018). "The trouble with science - Science Weekly podcast". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved June 17, 2019 via www.theguardian.com.
  3. Sweet, Tracy M. (July 27, 2017). "A Review of Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course With Examples in R and Stan". Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. 42 (1): 107–110. doi:10.3102/1076998616659752. ISSN   1076-9986. S2CID   125035918.
  4. Gelman, Andrew; Lee, Daniel; Guo, Jiqiang (October 1, 2015). "Stan: A Probabilistic Programming Language for Bayesian Inference and Optimization". Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. 40 (5): 530–543. doi:10.3102/1076998615606113. ISSN   1076-9986. S2CID   220415167.
  5. 1 2 "Richard McElreath". www.mpg.de. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  6. "Dept. of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture | Richard McElreath | CV". www.eva.mpg.de. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  7. "Richard McElreath - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  8. Smaldino Paul E.; McElreath Richard (2016). "The natural selection of bad science". Royal Society Open Science. 3 (9): 160384. arXiv: 1605.09511 . Bibcode:2016RSOS....360384S. doi:10.1098/rsos.160384. PMC   5043322 . PMID   27703703.
  9. Smaldino, Paul E.; McElreath, Richard (August 26, 2015). "Replication, Communication, and the Population Dynamics of Scientific Discovery". PLOS ONE. 10 (8): e0136088. arXiv: 1503.02780 . Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1036088M. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0136088 . ISSN   1932-6203. PMC   4550284 . PMID   26308448.
  10. Ball, Philip (November 16, 2016). "The mathematics of science's broken reward system". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2016.20987. ISSN   1476-4687. S2CID   185609227.
  11. "Incentive malus". The Economist. September 24, 2016. ISSN   0013-0613 . Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  12. Yong, Ed (September 21, 2016). "The Inevitable Evolution of Bad Science". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 8, 2019.