Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology
University of Oxford
Laura Fortunato is Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Laura's research aims to understand the evolution of human social and cultural behaviour, working at the interface of anthropology and biology. Three areas of ongoing research are the evolution of kinship and marriage systems, cultural evolution, and the evolution of cooperation and social complexity. Laura contributes teaching to courses on quantitative research methods, anthropology, and the evolution of human behaviour. Since joining Oxford in 2013, she has incorporated training in effective computing for reproducibility into her graduate teaching and supervision. She leads the Reproducible Research Oxford project, which she set up in 2016 with the aim to extend such training to students, researchers, and staff across the University. Laura studied Biological Sciences at the University of Padova (Laurea, 2003) and Anthropology at University College London (MRes, 2004; PhD, 2009). Between 2010 and 2013 she held an Omidyar Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute, where she is currently an External Professor. Since 2013 she has been based at the University of Oxford, as Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Tutorial Fellow in Evolutionary Anthropology at Magdalen College.
AS A TIER FELLOW ...Laura has been active in both teaching and dissemination of open research practice and reproducibility. For example, in September 2018 she helped coordinate and deliver a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Oxford (https://rroxford.github.io/2018-09-06-oxford/), and in January 2019 she served as an instructor at the BBSRC STARS course Advanced Methods for Reproducible Science (https://osf.io/gupxv/). She has delivered invited talks on research reproducibility at several events, both in the UK and internationally. Together with Project TIER co-directors and TIER Fellow Nicole Janz, she co-organized a TIER Faculty Development Workshop, held in Oxford in March 2019.
Since September 2018 Laura has been involved in setting up the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN; http://ukrn.org/), together with Marcus Munafò (University of Bristol), Chris Chambers (University of Cardiff), and Malcolm MacLeod (University of Edinburgh). To this end, she has been working to reconfigure the Reproducible Research Oxford initiative (http://rroxford.github.io/) into the local network of UKRN. Finally, in November 2018 Laura joined the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/).