Onkar Sadekar

I like to study human behaviour — why people cooperate, how culture takes hold and spreads, and what shapes the choices groups make together.

Three things I keep coming back to: evolutionary game theory, and what it takes for cooperation to survive as the rules of the game change; evolutionary anthropology and cultural evolution, especially how connected a population needs to be for culture to accumulate; and sports and team dynamics, where the data is good enough to actually test an idea about how individuals and groups perform together.

I came to this from statistical physics, which is where I started: stochastic processes, active matter, systems held far from equilibrium. I still like problems where a deliberately simple model produces behaviour nobody ordered — whether that is a sudden onset of cooperation, the spread of tool use between chimpanzee communities, or a batting collapse in a cricket match.