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.
[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.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has been awarded with several fellowships, as well as the inaugural Mason Durie Medal (in 2012) for his pioneering contributions to social science.
[3] In 2014, he became one of the two founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, where he has been heading the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution [until it moved to Leipzig in 2020].
[1] Gray's doctoral thesis was titled Design, constraint and construction: essays and experiments on evolution and foraging.