Dr Sam Passmore is a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, working within the HASS Digital Research Hub, within the College of Arts and Social Sciences. He is also affiliated with the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative (ECDI) and the Pacific Creoles Project, as part of the College of Asia and the Pacific.

Sam's research applies statistical inference and computational modelling (such as phylogenetics, machine learning, and auto-correlative models) to anthropological and linguistic questions, with a particular focus on building a quantitative understanding of human cultural diversity. Trained first in statistics and psychology at the University of Auckland, he went on to complete an MSc in Psychology at the University of Auckland before moving to the University of Bristol to complete his PhD in Anthropology. In Bristol, his doctoral work developed quantitative approaches to the evolution of kinship terminology. The mix of statistical and humanities training underpins his distinctive ability to bring rigorous formal methods to humanistic questions.

His work spans several major research threads. In the domain of kinship, Sam helped develop Kinbank (www.kinbank.net), a global database of kinship terminology for over 1,200 languages and has used it to investigate why human kinship systems, despite their theoretical complexity, converge on a small number of recurring structures worldwide. In musical diversity, he has been a key contributor to The Global Jukebox (www.theglobaljukebox.org), a publicly accessible database of over 6,000 coded songs from more than a thousand cultures, using it to demonstrate that global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories, a finding published in Nature Communications. He is also a contributor to Grambank, a large-scale typological database whose findings appeared in Science Advances. Most recently, his Pacific Creoles project is building large linguistic corpora for Tok Pisin, Solomon Island Pijin, and Bislama to support a new generation of language tools and research across the region.

Sam's research attracts considerable public interest. His work has been covered by New Scientist, Forbes, and The Times, featured on ABC NewsRadio and regional ABC radio, and discussed on the Because Language Podcast and in Cultured Scene Magazine. The Global Jukebox website received over 350,000 views and tens of thousands of social media interactions at launch, while Kinbank drew over 8,000 users in its first year.