CEP alum Elizabeth Agey won the 2026 Postdoctoral Award, for the best paper and presentation by a postdoctoral scholar at the 2026 meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Morocco.

Her winning paper was entitled Parental Influence on Mate Choice Shapes Reproduction and Socioeconomic Status in Nepal. For an earlier paper on a similar topic, click here.

Elizabeth did her doctoral work in Integrative Anthropological Sciences at UCSB, supervised by Steven Gaulin. She then did postdoctoral work on this topic, where she was co-supervised by Dan Conroy-Beam and David Lawson.

Dr. Agey is now an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She uses an evolutionary perspective to understand mate choice, marriage, family formation, and parenting. Her research examines how people and their parents choose partners in arranged marriages, and how parental influence on partner choice shapes reproduction, health, and wellbeing. She is also interested in how parents make decisions about how to raise their children, especially when they receive conflicting advice from different sources. Dr. Agey maintains an active research site in Dhading, Nepal, and is beginning comparative research projects among various groups in the United States. Her cross-disciplinary methods include cross-cultural and cross-species comparison, focus groups, structured surveys, machine learning, and field experiments.

CEP alumnus Michael Barlev won the 2026 Don Symons Adaptationism Award from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

The Don Symons Adaptationism Award is bestowed for the best paper exemplifying the adaptationist program.

Michael’s winning paper, with Steven Neuberg, is Rational Reasons for Irrational Beliefs

M. Barlev & S. Neuberg (2025) American Psychologist 80(1) 79-90.

Dr. Barlev is an evolutionary cognitive scientist interested in the psychology of beliefs. He asks questions such as:

What are beliefs? Why do some beliefs become culturally widespread? What roles do beliefs play in our private and social lives? How can we change problematic beliefs?

Combining foundational insights and tools from social psychology, computational cognitive science, adaptationist evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, and the humanities, he has studied religious beliefs, scientific beliefs, stereotypes and prejudices and more. Dr. Barlev is currently Research Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University.

Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution

Dan Conroy-Beam was honored at the 2026 Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting with the Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution.

The Early Career Award recognizes excellent young scientists who have made distinguished theoretical and/or empirical contributions to the study of evolution and human behavior.

Dan uses an evolutionary and computational perspective to understand social decision making, particularly in the domain of human mate choice and mating relationships. His work combines agent-based modeling, dyadic and behavioral data, and cross-cultural samples to develop, compare, and explore candidate models of the complete mating process. Dan’s interests range from how people evaluate potential partners, pursue and choose partners, and regulate their relationships.

Leda Cosmides was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2024.

[photo credit: Matt Perko]

She was cited by AAAS for “distinguished contributions to the field of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, particularly using evolutionary theory to develop computational theories of adaptive information processing problems”

The UCSB Current has an article with more:

and here is the announcement for all 2024 fellows from the AAAS:

Leda Cosmides was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. Founded in More details here and here.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S) was founded in 1780, during the American Revolution, by John Adams, John Hancock, and other U.S. Founding Fathers.

From the election letter: “The American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in our charter, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Our work has helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, the humanities, and the arts.”

“With your election, you join the company of notable members – from our earliest members John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maria Mitchell, and Alexander Graham Bell. Other distinguished members have included Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, E. O. Wilson, Madeleine Albright, and Colin Powell. International Honorary Members have included Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Wislawa Szymborska, Laurence Olivier, Mary Leakey, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Akira Kurosawa, and Nelson Mandela. Our current members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than two hundred and fifty Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners.”

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama (University of Oregon) is a CEP alum who earned her doctorate in literature. Recently she has created Talking Stories: An Encyclopedia of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and made it available to all who are interested in evolutionary psychology and the arts.

HBES gave its inaugural Don Symons Adaptationism Award at the 2023 Palm Springs conference. The award is bestowed for the best paper exemplifying the adaptationist program written or published in the last three years.

Although many excellent papers were nominated, three were so outstanding that the judges could not rank them. Two are CEP faculty—Jim Roney and Annie Wertz—and Larry Sugiyama (CEP alum ’96!), is senior author on the third.

Jim Roney won the award for his lead chapter on “Hormones and Human Mating” in the 2023 Handbook of Human Mating,

Annie Wertz won for her paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, How Plants Shape the Mind.

Larry Sugiyama won for his paper, Lassitude: The emotion of being sick, by Schrock, Snodgrass, & Sugiyama in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Human Behavior and Evolution Society