Russell Gray

Russell David Gray is a New Zealand evolutionary biologist and psychologist working on applying quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. In 2020, he became a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.^[1] Although originally trained in biology and psychology, Gray has become well known for his studies on the evolution of the Indo-European and Austronesian language families using computational phylogenetic methods.

Gray also performs research on animal cognition. One of his main research-projects studies the use of tools among New Caledonian crows.