Sam Passmore - Brief professional bio

Current position

I am currently a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, working within the HASS Digital Research Hub, within the College of Arts and Social Sciences. My role is to understand the use of computational approaches in the HASS community at ANU, and to understand the technological and infrastructural needs of that community to facilitate greater and higher quality research outputs. I am particularly interest in figuring out what technological infrastructure can make research more ‘doable’.

Research focus

My research focuses on the application statistical inference and computational modelling to anthropological or linguistic data and questions. I use data driven approaches to analyze data from the humanities, with a focus on building a quantitative understanding of diversity. I have used a range statistical approaches to do this, including phylogenetics, machine-learning, and autoregressive regression models. I am particularly interested in the relationship between statistics and their assumptions and how they relate to the mechanics of the real world. Generally, I take an evolutionary approach to my research, which could also be labelled as cultural evolution.

Details of the projects I am currently working on can be seen in the projects page

Previous positions

Between 2022 and 2026 I worked two positions, both based within the College of Asia and the Pacific, at the Australian National Univeristy (ANU). I am a Post-doctoral Research Fellow with the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative, and as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow on the Pacific Creoles Project, working with the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG).

In 2021, I worked for Associate Professor Patrick Savage as part of the CompMusic Lab, at Keio University in Fujisawa, Japan, and in 2020 I breifly worked for Russell Gray, at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany.

Between 2016 and 2020, I completed my PhD with Professor Fiona Jordan, as part of the excd.lab in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, and in 2014 I completed a Masters degree with Professor Quentin Atkinson in the School of Psychology, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Between my Master’s and PhD, I was a Data Scientist at Pingar International.