Lee Gettler

Dr Lee Gettler is Director of the Hormones, Health, and Human Behavior Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, USA, and a faculty affiliate of the Eck Institute for Global Health. Much of his early research focused on how men’s hormone physiology responds to major life transitions, such as marriage and fatherhood, and how men’s hormones relate to their behaviours as parents and partners. Working with collaborators at multiple global sites, he has expanded his focus to family systems and wellbeing, including the psychobiology of motherhood and fatherhood, parents’ physical and mental health, and child growth, development and physiology. Currently, he works on research projects related to these interests in the USA, the Philippines, and the Republic of Congo.

Dr Gettler has helped lead recent biocultural research on child growth and health in communities in the Republic of the Congo. This work has focused primarily on the different roles that fathers play within families in two neighbouring societies and whether higher-quality fathering, based on locally valued roles, is linked to better child outcomes. His future work aims to study how a transition away from traditional subsistence practices into regional and global market-based economies will change psychosocial experiences related to inequality and social networks, particularly as it relates to children’s stress-related physiology, including epigenetic profiles.

Throughout his career, Dr Gettler has also worked closely with his former Notre Dame colleague Dr James McKenna on research focusing on mother–infant sleep and breastfeeding. McKenna and Gettler proposed the concept of “breastsleeping” to refer to the evolved, integrated suite of behaviours and biology linking mother–infant shared sleep and breastfeeding. Although not the primary focus of his research programme, he maintains an interest in the role of fathers in the co-sleeping environment and has recently begun collaborating on new research on sleep patterns, social environments, and physiology among BaYaka communities in the Republic of the Congo.