Rate My Professor Darren Burke

Associate Professor Darren Burke serves in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he is based at the Ourimbah campus. As an experimental and biological psychologist, he focuses on the evolution of cognition and perception. Currently, he holds the position of Deputy Head of School for Teaching and Learning, undergraduate program convenor for psychology, Student Academic Conduct Officer, and has served on the University Human Research Ethics Committee. Burke maintains collaborations with researchers across various Australian universities. His research encompasses evolutionary cognition, including evolutionary psychology, comparative cognition, behavioural ecology, and human ethology. He examines cognitive, perceptual, and neural mechanisms from an evolutionary viewpoint in humans and non-human animals, with particular interests in visual perception, faces, and comparative psychology.

Burke's academic career includes a BSc (Hons) and PhD in Psychology from the University of Sydney (1984–1993), followed by a lectureship in the School of Psychology at the University of Wollongong (1995–2002) and an associate professorship in the Department of Psychology at Macquarie University (2002–2009). Since 2009, he has been Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle. His work has garnered over 1,880 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications include 'A new viewpoint on the evolution of sexually dimorphic human faces' (Evolutionary Psychology, 2010), 'The evolution of holistic processing of faces' (Frontiers in Psychology, 2013), 'Is There an Own-Race Preference in Attractiveness?' (Evolutionary Psychology, 2013), 'Why isn't everyone an evolutionary psychologist?' (Frontiers in Psychology, 2014), 'Food-specific spatial memory biases in an omnivorous bird' (Biology Letters, 2007), and more recent contributions such as 'The composite effect reveals that human (but not other primate) faces are special to humans' (2023) and 'Complex interactions confound any unitary approach to social phenomena, not just biological ones' (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2023). Burke contributes to teaching courses such as PSYC3301 and oversees student progress in psychology programs.