Russell Gray | |
|---|---|
| Born | Russell David Gray |
| Nationality | New Zealand |
| Occupation | Scientist |
| Academic background | |
| Thesis | Design, constraint and construction: Essays and experiments on evolution and foraging (1990) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Craig and Michael Davison |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History |
| Doctoral students | Simon Greenhill |
| Main interests | Evolution, computational phylogenetics |
Russell David Gray is a New Zealand evolutionary biologist and psychologist working on applying quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. In 2020, he became a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.[1] Although originally trained in biology and psychology, Gray has become well known for his studies on the evolution of the Indo-European and Austronesian language families using computational phylogenetic methods.
Gray also performs research on animal cognition. One of his main research-projects studies the use of tools among New Caledonian crows.