Biography
After graduating from an undergraduate in Biological Anthropology at Cambridge in 2017, I spent the majority of the next three years in SE Asia and the Pacific, exploring human locomotor performance—running, climbing, freediving and swimming—in both an academic and personal context. I lived with indigenous societies in Fiji, Malaysia and Indonesia, and have been lucky enough to train and work alongside elite ultrarunners, climbers and world-record freedivers in a variety of contexts. Most notably, on multiple occasions throughout 2018-19 I lived with a group of Batek hunter-gatherers in rainforest Peninsular Malaysia, exploring, among other things, their remarkable tree-climbing ability.
Research
My research is centred around the human evolutionary capacity for locomotor versatility—walking, running, climbing, swimming and freediving—exploring the human species’ remarkable locomotor diversity, and the mechanisms underpinning its variability on an inter- and intra-population level.
Employing a cross-cultural perspective through fieldwork with forager populations across SE Asia, as well as global ethnographic analyses of the ecological and spatial distributions of locomotor subsistence strategies, my research focuses on the dynamics and frameworks that make up the human locomotor performance space. In doing so I aim to provide insight into the patterns and determinants of human locomotor variability from the level of the species to that of the population and individual, and to examine the basis of our species’ capacity to become adept at exploiting almost every environment on earth.
Teaching and Supervisions
Supervised by Prof. Marta Mirazon Lahr