Rebecca Sear

Rebecca Sear is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Life Sciences at Brunel University London's College of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences. She concurrently heads the Evolutionary Demography Group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), where she held a Reader position since 2012. An interdisciplinary scholar trained in zoology, statistics, and biological anthropology, she directs the Centre for Culture and Evolution and serves as President of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association.

Her research integrates evolutionary theory with demographic methods to investigate:

• Evolutionary demography of kinship networks and fertility
• Cross-cultural family structures and reproductive health
• Eugenics history in contemporary academia
• Methodological innovations in multi-sited data collection

Current projects include the ERC-funded 'Family matters: intergenerational influences on fertility' and the 'Beyond the Mother' infant feeding study using real-time app data.

Recent publications demonstrate consistent focus on fertility determinants across ecological settings, with emerging critical work on eugenics in population science. Her 2024-2025 output spans high-impact journals including PNAS and Proceedings of the Royal Society B, emphasizing cross-cultural reproductive strategies and pandemic fertility disruptions.

Key honors include leadership of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association. Her collaborative work involves extensive co-author networks across global institutions, particularly in Africa and Europe.

Research funding includes the Brunel Research Initiative and Enterprise Fund (BRIEF) for the 'Beyond the Mother' project, examining real-time infant feeding support through the Baby Buddy app. She supervises interdisciplinary teams within the Centre for Culture and Evolution, focusing on evolutionary approaches to health disparities.

Her laboratory infrastructure leverages digital health tools for real-time behavioral data collection, with recent work developing mobile app-based methodologies to overcome recall bias in maternal health research.