I received my MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and completed my PhD in Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington. My doctoral research used cultural evolutionary approaches to understand the persistence and adaptive success of Hinduism relative to other polytheistic traditions. In particular, I examined how Hindu deities function as mechanisms of norm transmission and how their representations vary in response to the socio-ecological contexts in which they are worshipped.

I conduct most of my fieldwork within two Indian linguistic communities, Gujaratis and Maharashtrians, of which I am a member and where I maintain ongoing research sites. This work combines ethnographic, experimental, and large-scale survey methods to explore how religious beliefs and practices shape social behaviour.

Moving forward, I hope to contribute to a more nuanced representation of Hinduism within the cognitive science and cultural evolution of religion. In addition to understanding how religion promotes cooperation and norm transmission, I am increasingly interested in the non-prosocial functions of religious beliefs, rituals, and cognition, and the ways these may contribute to the persistence and diversity of religious systems.