Andrew Trees

You might call him the accidental scientist. Having spent years having his sisters and female friends tell him about the latest dating advice book, and he was always struck by how they all seemed to be little more than random anecdotes. One afternoon, he was reading a book on how game theory was being used to run more effective auctions when he had a strange thought: Why couldn’t you use game theory to date more effectively? And, by extension, what could science teach us about the nature of human attraction?

With that simple idea in mind, he wrote "Decoding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince and Other Lessons From the Science of Attraction." Delving into fields such as evolutionary psychology, game theory, economics, and neurochemistry, he explores the various answers that researchers have come up with for how and why one person is attracted to another. Along the way, he discovered that our pursuit of romance may be the key to what makes us human and even plays a central role in the size and sophistication of our brains.

"Decoding Love" has led to regular media appearances as well as several invitations to give talks and presentations. Besides the numerous interviews he did when the book was released, he have become a member of the Today Show’s “Guys Tell All” panel, which answers questions from women about why men behave the way they do. He has also become a regular guest on The Tyra Show, where he discusses the latest scientific research on sex and relationships. This past February, he was a featured speaker at Yale University’s “Sex Week” as well as the main speaker at the Science Lab in Trinity College, Dublin.

His appeal across a wide variety of forums ranging from Ivy League schools to day-time talk shows stems from one major cause: a hunger for reliable, scientific information about attraction. Few people realize that there even is much research about human attraction, let alone what that research is. While scientists have not discovered any magical answers for how to find true love, they can tell us a remarkable amount about why two people come together as well as the forces that often drive them apart.