Hello!
My name is Kaleda, and I'm from Vancouver, Canada. I am interested in social behavior at all scales, from ants to humans to AI. Specifically, my research seeks to understand how individual decision-making processes (such as 'follow the majority' or 'cooperate with friends') scale up to produce emergent, group-level phenomena such as norms, fads, and collective behavior. Currently, I am an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and I received my PhD from Stanford University in 2023.
Click the links at the top right to learn more, scroll down for recent updates, and please feel free to reach out!
News
2025
April 8: presented a talk, Biased decision-making in organisms and large language models, at the Society for Modeling and Theory in Population Biology SMTPBConnect Grad and Postdoc Research Showcase
April 4: was the runner-up for the John Maynard Smith Prize from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology — see announcement here
March 10-13: co-organized a Micro Working Group at the Santa Fe Institute, Populations on the brink: Robust estimation for optimal reintroduction ranges
March 3: presented an invited talk, Following the majority or the mean: Conformity in humans and large language models, at the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) Symposium at Stanford University
February 18: presented a talk, Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits, at the Winter Quantitative Biology Conference in Oahu, Hawai'i, and chaired this morning's session
January 29: visited Stanford University and gave a talk about my current research to Marc Feldman's lab
January 17: the Santa Fe Institute published a news article about my research, New study offers insights into how populations conform or go against the crowd
January 17: my paper with Elisa Heinrich Mora, Michael Palmer, and Marcus Feldman, Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits, was published in PNAS
2024
September 11: presented a talk, Conditions that favour cumulative cultural evolution, at the Cultural Evolution Society Conference in Durham, UK
August 12: gave a Slice of Science presentation, Dimensionality reduction methods in population genetics, at the Santa Fe Institute
July 18: posted an arXiv preprint, Conformity to continuous and discrete ordinal traits (which was later published in PNAS as Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits)
July 1: began my Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI news article: SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton)
May 27: completed Stanford's Postdoctoral Mentoring Certificate, Tier 1
May 24: presented an invited talk, Modelling constant and stochastically variable conformity, at the Banff International Research Station Workshop on Modeling and Theory in Population Biology
April 1: my paper with Uri Liberman and Marcus Feldman, On random conformity bias in cultural transmission of polychotomous traits, was published in Theoretical Population Biology
February 1: my paper with Peter Nonacs, Eusociality is not a major evolutionary transition, and why that matters, was published in Insectes Sociaux
2023
October 1: my paper with Jeremy Kendal, Yasuo Ihara, and Marcus Feldman, Cultural niche construction with application to fertility control: A model for education and social transmission of contraceptive use, was published in Theoretical Population Biology in memory of Freddy Christiansen
June 30: began my postdoctoral research in Marc Feldman's lab at Stanford University
June 18: was awarded the Samuel Karlin Prize in Mathematical Biology for my PhD dissertation
May 23: began co-instructing the mini-course Biosciences 213: Ecology and Evolution of Altruism with Talia Borofsky
May 12: defended my PhD thesis, Evolutionary dynamics of conformity, at Stanford University
April 7: my work with Egor Lappo and Marcus Feldman, Conformity and anti-conformity in a finite population, was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology
March 13: my work with Yoav Ram and Marcus Feldman, Conditions that favour cumulative cultural evolution, was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B as part of the theme issue 'Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions'
March 7: gave an invited talk, Evolutionary dynamics of conformity, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany