Megan R. Gunnar

Biosketch

Megan R. Gunnar is a Regents Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Stanford University in 1978 with Eleanor Maccoby and a postdoctoral fellowship in psychoneuroendocrinology with Seymour Levine at Stanford Medical School in 1979. She joined the faculty of the Institute of Child Development in the fall of 1979 and has spent her career there. She studies how stress affects development and the processes that help children regulate stress hormones and other stress-responsive systems. In addition to the NAS, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Education. She has lifetime achievement awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development , the Association for Psychological Sciences and the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology. She has mentoring awards from the Association for Psychological Sciences and the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology. She is involved in many activities to translate the science of early development for use by policy makers, including being a founding member of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, and sat for a decade on the Minnesota Governor’s Children’s Cabinet Advisory Council.

Research Interests

Megan Gunnar's laboratory is interested in the social regulation of stress physiology during development. They have shown that secure attachment relationships serve as powerful regulators of stress physiology, notably the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) system and the sympathetic-adrenomedullary system. With puberty, parents become less powerful regulators of the HPA axis. Gunnar and her students are currently working to understand when and how other relationships may serve as stress regulators during adolescence. Currently, they are examining whether "sharing the load" with a friend will help buffer stress in adolescence. Her laboratory has also shown that when children lack an adult regulatory partner, as in children reared in orphanage/institutional care, the physiology of stress is markedly dysregulated. Specially, the stress response is blunted, a pattern associated with externalizing and attention problems. This dysregulation persists once children are placed in supportive families. However, her laboratory has recently shown that puberty opens a window for recalibration of the HPA axis and perhaps other stress-defense system. Increasing reactivity to normative levels, however, appears to result in increases in internalizing symptoms. In interdisciplinary collaborations, Gunnar's laboratory has also shown that early institutional rearing results in increases in terminally differentiated T-cells and poorer cardiometabolic health in adolescence, despite a lean BMI.