Dr Paula Sheppard

paula sheppard new

Departmental Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology

Research and Training Lead for the Grand Union DTP

Unit Affiliation: Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology

Contact

 paula.sheppard@anthro.ox.ac.uk     BSKY: @paulajasheppard.bsky.social     Connect on LinkedIn    Personal Website & Media

 

Supervision

I am not currently available for supervision.

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Bio

I completed an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford and another MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics in 2011. In 2014, I was awarded my PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2014 and was then employed there as a post-doctoral researcher. I returned to Oxford in 2016 to take up a post-doctoral position with the Oxford Sociology department, investigating the impact of family size on socioeconomic inequality, and the impact of grandparents on social mobility. I have been faculty at the School of Anthropology since 2019, providing teaching for the Medical and Evolutionary anthropology MSc degrees, and for the Human Sciences undergraduates.

 

Interests

My research centres around reproductive decision-making, the evolution of childhood, and the ecology of families. I use life-history theory as an overarching framework to think about family size, child and maternal health, and racism in sciences and medicine.

 

I am an Evolutionary Anthropologist and human behavioural scientist, and I apply mixed methodologies to investigate prevailing social phenomena such as what people see as barriers to having children in high-income countries. I have pioneered a new methodology to address this question in the UK and I’ve found that social support is the most important thing men and women are looking for. Gender equality in childcare and the support of hands-on dads are especially important for highly-educated women when making the decision to start a family. 
I am also looking at the impact of family size on child health outcomes in a large cross-cultural study, part of the Templeton-funded project on the evolutionary dynamics of religion, family size, and child success. 

I am a fellow of the Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group.at Oxford and Outreach Officer for the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association. I am an associate editor for the Journal of Biosocial Science, and I serve on the ESRC Peer Review College.

 

Teaching

I teach Quantitative Methods and Evolutionary Medicine and Public Health to Masters and Undergraduate students. This programme has an accompanying seminar series on my YouTube channel where you can see previous talks.

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Current DPhil students
Selected Publications

Sheppard, P. (2024). Using discrete choice modeling to understand the drivers of reproductive delay in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Population Studies.

Sheppard, P. and D. Coall (2024) The role of ontogeny in human evolutionary demography. Chpt 8 in Human Evolutionary Demography. Burger, O., R. Lee, and R. Sear (eds.) Open Book Publishers

Brough, M. and P. Sheppard (2022) Fertility decision-making in the UK: Insights from a qualitative study among British men and women. Social Sciences 11(9): 409

Sheppard, P. and M. Brough (2022) Father-toddler bonding during the Covid-19 lockdown: Qualitative insights from 17 families in Britain. Social Sciences 11(12): 542

Sheppard, P. and K. Snopkowski (eds.) (2021) The Behavioral Ecology of the Family. Special Issue in Social Sciences.

Sheppard, Paula. 2021. ‘Grandparental Investment’. In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Parenting, edited by Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford and Todd Kennedy Shackelford. Oxford University Press.

Sheppard, Paula, and Zachary Van Winkle. (2020). ‘Using Sequence Analysis to Test If Human Life Histories Are Coherent Strategies’. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2020.38.

Sheppard, Paula, Mark Pearce, and Rebecca Sear. (2016). ‘How Does Childhood Socioeconomic Hardship Affect Reproductive Strategy? Pathways of Development’. American Journal of Human Biology 28 (3): 356–63.

Sheppard, Paula, Justin R Garcia, and Rebecca Sear. (2015). ‘Childhood Family Disruption and Adult Height: Is There a Mediating Role of Puberty?’ Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health 2015 (1): 332–42.