Dr Rebecca Sear

Reader

Background

Rebecca's background is interdisciplinary: after an education in Zoology (BSc, Nottingham University), Statistics (Diploma, University College London) and Biological Anthropology (MSc and PhD, Unversity College London), she taught demography at the London School of Economics for 8 years before becoming a Reader in Evolutionary Anthropology at Durham University. She took up her current post as Reader in Population and Health at LSHTM in April 2012, and now heads the Evolutionary Demography Group.

Affiliation

Centres

Research

Rebecca's research interests lie in human behavioural ecology and evolutionary demography, mainly focused in two areas: investigating the impact of kin on reproductive outcomes and examining interactions between health and reproduction. Initially her research was based in sub-Saharan Africa, but she is now interested in comparative work, testing the same hypotheses in a variety of ecological settings to establish their ecological variability. A recent major research project was a European Research Council funded project 'Family matters: intergenerational influences on fertility', which aimed to test the influence of kin on fertility across a range of populations, using both small-scale datasets from traditional susbsistence populations and large-scale, nationally representative demographic datasets. 


Research areas

  • Child health
  • Fertility

Disciplines

  • Anthropology
  • Demography

Other interests

  • MARCH
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