Keynote speaker

My research tackles a foundational challenge in behavioural ecology, evolutionary biology, and social science: understanding how honest signalling, reputation, and cooperation can persist across diverse biological and social systems. Drawing on a series of publications in leading journals, my work develops formal models that clarify the evolutionary logic underlying costly signalling, index signals, reputation dynamics, and strategic interaction. We have shown how these apparently competing mechanisms can be understood within a common framework of signalling trade-offs. This body of work explicitly engages with central questions about when honesty requires costs or external enforcement and when it emerges naturally from social structure and repeated interactions, generating insights that span theoretical and empirical domains.
Beyond individual papers, I have played a leading role in shaping the research agenda on these issues by organizing two major multidisciplinary workshop at the Lorentz Center: (i) The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling (2019) and (ii) Honest signalling and communication: from microbes to humans (2025) that brought together behavioural ecologists, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to synthesize perspectives across fields. The first workshop stimulated a Royal Society theme issue on the same topic, which promotes an interdisciplinary research programme exploring reputation systems, honest signalling, and cooperation in animals and humans, and has drawn broad attention across disciplinary boundaries. Together, my publications and these organized scholarly forums demonstrate both the depth of my contributions and my capacity to integrate and lead cross-disciplinary inquiry.