Russell Gray

Russell Gray is a Professor and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, with adjunct positions at the University of Auckland and Australian National University. His pioneering work applies computational evolutionary methods to linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution.

Education:

• Ph.D. University of Auckland, 1990

Research interests: Professor Gray's interdisciplinary research spans cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and philosophy of biology. He has transformed understanding of Indo-European origins, Pacific settlement patterns, and the co-evolution of religion and social complexity. His work integrates phylogenetic methods with ethnographic and historical data to reconstruct cultural trajectories.

Publications: Seminal publications include cross-cultural studies of religious beliefs, language evolution, and social stratification. Recent work focuses on global linguistic diversity through projects like Grambank, examining constraints on grammatical features across thousands of languages.

Awards:

• Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealand
• Mason Durie Medal for Social Science
• Herbert Jacobs Award (twice)
• 9 publications in Nature/Science

Professor Gray leads large-scale collaborative projects on linguistic diversity and cultural evolution, supervising researchers worldwide through the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution.