Francisco Gil-White

Who is Francisco Gil-White?

Francisco Gil-White is an evolutionary and sociocultural anthropologist who teaches Organizational Behavior, Knowledge Management, and The Political History of the West and Antisemitism at ITAM, in Mexico City. He also teaches Systems and Evolutionary Thinking at Universidad del Medio Ambiente.

He was Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania from 2001 to 2006 and lecturer at the Solomon Asch Centre for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. He was born in Chicago and raised in Mexico City. His father is Francisco Gil Díaz, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit in the cabinet of Vicente Fox. He holds a Masters Degree in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Biological and Cultural Anthropology from UCLA.

Francisco Gil-White’s social scientific approach is broadly interdisciplinary and merges cultural and biological perspectives on human behavior. At the University of Chicago he obtained a master’s degree in social sciences that was flexible enough for him to also get training in population genetics and evolutionary theory. His master’s thesis, which defended that social science should be integrated with biology but not swallowed by it, won the 1996 Earl S. and Esther Johnson Prize, awarded for "combin[ing] high scholarly achievement with concern for humanistic aspirations and the practical applications of the Social Sciences."