Fiona Jordan is an evolutionary and linguistic anthropologist and has been based at Department of Anthropology & Archaeology in Bristol since 2012, most recently as Professor. Prior to that she worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, and at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. Her key interest is understanding cultural diversity, with a focus on two key questions: Why do humans have so much variation in behaviour and culture? But, at the same time: Why don’t human societies vary more? Her work seeks to do cross-cultural research in new and innovative ways by combining methods, data, and theory from biology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. At the core of her research is cultural phylogenetics: understanding cultural diversity using the same statistical tools that biologists use to investigate evolutionary and diversity processes in other species.