Robert Kurzban received a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of California in Santa Barbara under his advisors, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. He established the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology and is now an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His interests include applying evolutionary approaches to cognition to a range of problems in social psychology. He was the first to analyze topics such as applications of evolutionary principles to experimental economics in order to understand the problem of getting people to cooperate. His research focuses on the nature of evolved cognitive adaptations for social life and the cognitive underpinnings of these processes. While doing this research he uses methods drawn from experimental economics and cognitive psychology.