American anthropologist (born 1973)
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]
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]
