Ryan Nichols

Ryan Nichols is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. He is an interdisciplinary researcher who, since 2004, has been mostly focused on the question ‘What made China Chinese?’ In pursuit of an answer, he has collaborated with researchers in the humanities, gene-culture co-evolution, psychology, social science, life science, data science, genetics, and mathematics. Ryan has published a monograph with Oxford, and edited The Routledge International Handbook of Morality, Cognition, and Emotion in China (2022). He has held fellowships at University of British Columbia, Notre Dame, the National Endowment for the Humanities, a three-year Academic Cross-Training fellowship, and in 2025-26 will be on fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg. He makes an effort to learn from everyone he meets. He is looking forward to the 'How humans came to construct their worlds' because of the theme's connection to niche construction theory, cultural evolution, and the opportunity it affords to explore with experts ways in which evolutionary psychological factors, e.g. mate guarding, may have influenced architecture.