Cv mdb jan18

Dr. Mícheál de Barra Centre for Culture and Evolution Brunel University London Marie Jahoda 110 Middlesex UB8 3PH

Email: Phone: Homepage:

micheal.debarra@brunel.ac.uk 0044 (0)7591 052617 www.michealdebarra.org

Education Ph.D. Psychology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2008–2012 Thesis supervisor: Prof. Val Curtis M.Sc. Evolutionary Psychology, University of Liverpool, 2006–2007 Thesis supervisor: Dr. Steven Platek B.A. Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2002–2005

Fellowships and Grants Prof Roy Weir Career Development Fellowship. Eighteen month project entitled What Drives The Emergence of Inaccurate Health Beliefs? (Value: £64,527, Dec 2015 - Sept 2017) Medical Research Scotland Summer Vacation Scholarship. How People Evaluate the Value of Screening after Positive Results: An Analysis of Online Forums. (Value: £2,000, June - July 2016) Life Sciences Fellowship at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Studies). A three-month funded residency to work on a project entitled The Cultural Evolution of Harmful Medicine.

(Jan - Mar 2014)

Employment Brunel University London, Lecturer, Centre for Culture and Evolution. Jan 2018 onwards.

Oxford University Brookes, Fixed term lecturer. Sept 2017 - Dec 2017.

University of Aberdeen, Health Psychology Group, Department of Applied Health Sciences. Research Fellow. Feb 2015 - Sept 2017.

Stockholm University, Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution. Postdoctoral Fellow. Jan 2012 – Aug 2014.

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Research assistant and PhD student. Oct 2006 – Dec 2011.

Tutor in an applied behaviour analysis school for children with autism, ABACAS, Dublin, Sept 2005 – Oct 2006.

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Publications Preprints / Under review de Barra M., Jansson F, Cownden D. Medicine as Message: Caregiving, Illness Deception, and the Cultural Evolution of Harmful Treatments SocArXiv Preprint: https://osf.io/7d8zk/ de Barra M, Scott C, Johnston M, de Bruin M, Scott N, Bond C, Matheson C, Watson M. Effect of Outpatient Pharmacists’ Non-Dispensing Roles on Patient Outcomes and Prescribing Patterns: A Cochrane Review.

Published or forthcoming papers Steinkopf L & de Barra M. (2018) Therapeutic Encounters and the Elicitation of Community Care. Forthcoming commentary in Brain and Behavioural Sciences.

Strimling P, de Barra M, Eriksson K. (2018) Asymmetries in Punishment Propensity May Drive the Civilizing Process. Nature Human Behaviour doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0278-z de Barra M. (2017) Reporting Bias Inflates the Reputation of Medical Treatments: A Comparison of Outcomes in Clinical Trials and Online Product Reviews. Social Science & Medicine 177:248-255 (See also a commentary by Prof John P. A. Ioannidis 177:256-258) Tybur JM, Inbar Y, Aarøe L, Barclay P, Barlow KF, de Barra M, Becker DV et al. (2016) Why Does the Behavioral Immune System Relate to Conservatism? Testing Competing Hypotheses Across 30 Nations.

PNAS 13(44), 12408–12413 Eriksson K, Coultas J, de Barra M. (2016) Cross-Cultural Differences in Emotional Selection on Transmission of Information. Journal of Cognition and Culture 16(1-2) de Barra M, Strimling P, Eriksson, K. (2014) How Feedback Biases Give Ineffective Medical Treatments a Good Reputation. Journal of Medical Internet Research 16(8):e193 de Barra M, Islam S, Curtis V. (2014) Disgust Sensitivity is not Associated with Health in a Rural Bangladeshi Sample. PLOS ONE 9(6): e100444 de Barra M, DeBruine LM, Jones BC, Zahid HM, Curtis V. (2013) Childhood Illness Predicts Face Preferences in Adulthood. Evolution & Human Behaviour 34(6) de Barra M, Curtis, V. Are Out-Groups’ Pathogens Really More Dangerous? (2012) A Commentary on ‘Parasite-Stress Promotes In-Group Assortative Sociality: The Cases of Strong Family Ties and Heightened Religiosity’. Brain and Behavioural Sciences 35(2) Fleischman DS, Webster GD, Judah G, de Barra M, Aunger R, Curtis V. (2011) Sensor Recorded Changes in Rates of Hand Washing with Soap in Response to the Media Reports of the H1N1 Pandemic in Britain.

BMJ Open 24; 1(2) Curtis V, de Barra M, Aunger R. (2011) Disgust as an Adaptive System for Disease Avoidance Behaviour.

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 12; 366(1563), 289–401 Dodrill L, Schmidt WP, Cobb E., Donachie P, Curtis V, de Barra M. (2011) Male Commuters in North and South England: Risk Factors for the Presence of Faecal Bacteria on Hands. BMC Public Health 11:31 de Barra M. (2009) Encouraging handwashing: Simple Measures May Bring Health Benefits in Developing Countries, Student BMJ 17:b4656

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Presentations Selected invited seminars de Barra M. Why ineffective Treatments Appear to Work, Portsmouth Psychology Department, London, UK, November 2015. de Barra M. The Cultural Evolution of Ineffective Medicine, UCL Biological Anthropology Seminar Series, London, UK, March 2014. de Barra M. How Feedback Biases Give Harmful Medicine a Good Reputation, Lunchtime seminar, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany, February 2014. de Barra M. How do bad medical treatments spread? Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, May 2013.

Selected conference presentations de Barra M. Reporting Bias Inflates the Reputation of Medical Treatments: A Comparison of Outcomes in Clinical Trials and Online Product Reviews. Too Much Medicine: Using interdisciplinary research to explore how to solve the problem, University of Oxford, UK, April 2017. de Barra M. Why Ineffective Medicines Appear to Work: Online Medical Reviews Suggest Widespread Over-Reporting of Positive Outcomes. European Health Psychology Conference, Aberdeen, UK, August 2016. de Barra M, Strimling P, Eriksson K. It’s the Wrong Game: The Strategic Structure of Hygiene Related Behaviors. 15th International Conference on Social Dilemmas, ETH, Zurich, July 2013. de Barra M. Does disgust predict fewer infections? A Study of the Behavioural Immune System in Rural Bangladesh, HBES conference, Montpellier France, July 2011.

Public Engagement Café Scientific Public Lecture. Poisoned by Doctors! The History and Psychology of Dangerous Medicine.

Tarland, UK, April 2016.

My research has been described in several online and print publications (e.g., The Independent; NHS website) and I have been interviewed live on regional and national radio (e.g., BBC Radio Scotland).

Teaching and Mentoring Supervised six MSc projects on a range of health and behaviour topics.

Undergraduate lecturing in biological and cognitive psychology, research methods, and statistics.

Module leader / lecturer in postgraduate statistics (2017).

Supervised a number of medicine and psychology undergraduate projects.

Lectured MSc students on Behavioural Ecology Perspectives on Health Behaviour, and Cognitive Basis of Ineffective Medical Procedures in the University of Aberdeen.

Lectured MSc students on Evolution, Infectious Disease and Animal Behaviour in Stockholm University.

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Research Skills Competent in the use of SPSS, EpiInfo, LATEX, NVivo, RMarkdown, and R. Experience in conducting systematic reviews and meta analysis.

Quantitative analysis of natural human communication (e.g., text of medical product reviews, social media posts) using qdap package in R. Also dataset generation by web scraping with rvest.

Advocate and practitioner of Open Science; where possible hypotheses and methods are preregistered and the analysis syntax and raw data from the projects I lead is made freely available in online repositories.

Competent in the use of the following statistical models: Regression, ANOVA, mixed (multi-level) models, factor analysis and meta-analysis.

Conducted four months of field research in rural Bangladesh and Tanzania. Skills developed include questionnaire development and validation, structured observation, intensive longitudinal data collection with WOMBAT software.

Professional Activities Ad hoc reviewer for The BMJ, The Cochrane Collaboration, Social Science & Medicine, Human Nature, Evolution & Human Behaviour, Biology Letters, Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

European Health Psychology Conference 2016: Organising Committee.

SYNERGY 2016 (expert meeting at European Health Psychology Conference) local organiser.

London Evolutionary Research Network, Co-Chair, 2010-2011. I co-organised a student conference, series of seminars, a major debate on group selection, and a weekly reading group on mathematical models of social evolution.

Member of European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, 2007–present.

Member of European Health Psychology Society, 2015–present.

Career Break In late 2014, I took six months off work to go bicycle touring. I cycled about 3,000km, beginning in Kyrgystan, then over the Pamir Mountains in Central Asia, through Iran, and ending in Dubai.

Last updated: February 6, 2018