Megan Gunnar

Megan R. Gunnar is a Regents Professor, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and a member of the University of Minnesota’s Distinguished Academy of Teachers. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Stanford University in 1978, completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Psychoneuroendocrinology at Stanford Medical School and then joined the faculty in Minnesota in the fall of 1979. Professor Gunnar has spent her career studying how stress biology affects neurobehavioral development and the processes that help children regulate stress hormones. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, 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 Science (APS), and International Society for Psychoneuoendocrinology. She also has mentoring awards from the APS and the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology. She is involved in many activities to translate research on early development for use by policy makers, practitioners and families, including being a founding member of the Harvard’s National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. She serves on the boards of Think Small, the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery and is on the Advisory Council to Children’s Cabinet for the State of Minnesota.

Effects of early adverse care on brain and behavioral development; Stress neurobiology and development.

Human Developmental Psychobiology Lab

Lab

The Gunnar Laboratory for Developmental Psychobiology Research

Research

My lab studies how children and adolescents regulate stress and emotions. Two issues currently motivate most of our work.

First, we know that during infancy and childhood attachment relationships are powerful regulators of the child’s stress system. Regulation of the stress system by the parent-child attachment relationships appears to become less effective in adolescence. Furthermore, this shift in effectiveness is associated more with pubertal stage than age, and we find that friends do not simply take over for parents as social buffers of stress. We are currently working on an imaging paradigm to help us explore how the changes in social buffering during the peripubertal period relate to changes in brain activation patterns during stressors.

Second, we have found that children who did not have the opportunity to form stable attachment relationships early in life (i.e., those adopted from orphanages) also fail to be able to use the parent-child relationship to regulate stress during childhood. Such children also show atypical patterns of stress activity in anticipation of threat. However, for these children puberty, being a period of heightened neural plasticity may open a window of opportunity to recalibrate the stress system. Thus we are examining the role of puberty in interaction with current psychosocial stress conditions in shaping stress reactivity and regulation in both youth with a history of deprived care (orphanage-adopted children) and children reared in their families of origin. 

Advising expectations and availability

If you are a prospective graduate student who is interested in working with Dr. Gunnar, click here to review her advising expectations. This advising document outlines what you can expect from Dr. Gunnar as an advisor/mentor and provides an overview of Dr. Gunnar's expectations of students. Expectations for both the child psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota and the Gunnar Laboratory for Developmental Psychobiology Research can be found here.

Dr. Gunnar is phasing into retirement and is no longer taking new Ph.D. students either as primary or co-advisor.