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Judith M. Stern

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Book cover Biographical History of Behavioral Neuroendocrinology

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Abstract

Judith M. Stern was born in 1944 in Brooklyn, NY. As a student at Brooklyn College, she was exposed to the field of physiological psychology and developed an interest in how the brain controls behavior. Her scientific path involved graduate training at the Rutgers Newark Institute of Animal Behavior, postdoctoral work at Stanford University, and then an 35-year career as a faculty member at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Much of Stern’s scientific research focused on the behavioral neuroendocrinology of parenting and it involved a broad array of animals (birds, rodents, humans). Stern’s research provided critical early knowledge regarding where steroid hormones bind in the brain to regulate parenting, how motherhood alters the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and vice versa, how suckling and other offspring cues affect maternal prolactin levels, the indispensable role of somatosensation for maternal caregiving, and how motherhood elicits neuroplasticity in the female cerebral cortex. Threads of Stern’s work can still be seen in a number of current research subfields studying the endocrinology and neurobiology of non-human and human motherhood.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Judith M. Stern for the numerous interviews and editorial contributions that contributed to this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology & Neuroscience Program, Interdisciplinary Science & Technology Building (ISTB), Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Joseph S. Lonstein

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  1. Joseph S. Lonstein
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Correspondence to Joseph S. Lonstein .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neuroscience Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Randy J. Nelson

  2. Department of Neuroscience Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Zachary M. Weil

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Lonstein, J.S. (2022). Judith M. Stern. In: Nelson, R.J., Weil, Z.M. (eds) Biographical History of Behavioral Neuroendocrinology . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12970-4_41

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