Out of the Nest Posted on January 9, 2008 Megan R. Gunnar (bio) embarked on independent research when her mentor gave her the push she needed.

In my second year at Stanford I was offered the opportunity of working with some researchers who were studying a particular question, and Eleanor looked at me and she said, “It’s time for you to do your own research. Don’t just keep going on and doing work with others, because who are you going to be when you’re done?”

And she made sure the money was available, so it was both a harsh reality — almost like a slap in the face — but it was, boy, it was wonderful. Had I not, I might have been pushed out of the nest in a sense. So I began doing my own research on control and fear and predictability and so on, and it was going great, and I was fascinated by the whole question.

And I was reading more broadly, and all of a sudden, bam! I ran into the same bloody book I’d been reading about on the sex difference area because this is control, fear, and stress. So I started reading in the stress area, and all of a sudden Seymour Levine came up again, and he was the fellow who had exposed the little rats to testosterone postnatally and altered their sex behavior.

Now I’m reading stuff about, he’s measuring the stress hormones and the role of experience, and I’m going, “Wow! Really smart guy!” And he was at Stanford, over in the medical school, and at one point he offered a course in psychobiology of stress. I ran to Eleanor; I said, “Isn’t this wonderful?” And she said, “Well, yeah, you know.”

And I took it as the only psych student, and it was all his students. And it became a seminar on teaching me again everything that we do in our lab and have ever done; it was wonderful. And I at the end of that began doing research in, it turns out he’s called Gig Levine, in Gig’s lab, and so part of my day was spent doing gonadectomies on rats. We were studying flavor-toxicosis, and I would run from there back to test 12-month-olds, and my own dissertation research. It was a little schizophrenic, and I did a post-doc in his lab because I decided really this was pulling together two of my passions.

I was fascinated with how biology and behavior cohere, and I was less interested now in how that happened to support the development of gender differences in behavior and much more interested in this issue of fear, anxiety, stress, control, and so on.

So I did a post-doc, partially retooled. At that time there really wasn’t much of this happening in human developmental research. Certainly none, almost none, on hormone behavior relations, but I didn’t want to retool into a monkey person or a rat person, because I like monkeys a lot. Rats are okay, but I’m just not passionate about them

And we knew at that time that the measures which at that point were plasma or urine, really restrictive for doing human developmental research, that salivary measures were on the horizon, they were looking good. So I went on the job market after a year of a post-doc, but I’d already worked in the lab for a year over there as well, as someone who was going to try to do human developmental psychobiology, an area that really almost didn’t exist at that point.

« Back to Article