Karen Kramer

Karen Kramer is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in Demography, and held academic appointments at Stony Brook University and Harvard University before going to Utah in 2012.  Kramer is a behavioral ecologist with research interests in the evolution of human sociality, life history, cooperative breeding and childhood. She has worked with the Savanna Pumé, a group of South American hunter-gatherers, and the Yucatec Maya, subsistence farmers for the past 30 years. Kramer's research has been funded by the NIH, NSF, the Packard Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and William F. Milton Fund (Harvard University), among others.  Current research is focused on reproductive and economic responses to environmental uncertainty, and reconsidering that human evolution posed opportunities rather than limits to women’s and children’s cooperation.