Amanda M. Dettmer, PhD

Amanda M. Dettmer, PhD, is a Research Scientist at the Yale Child Study Center, where she leads the Human and Animal Integrated Research (HAIR) Lab. She is a comparative psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist with over 20 years of experience studying nonhuman primate models of child health and development.

Dr. Dettmer's research program examines the impact of early life factors and individual differences on health across the lifespan. For this research, she takes a comparative approach: she relies on nonhuman primates as translational models for human child development, employing multidisciplinary approaches including ethology, neuroendocrinology, immunology, and epigenetics. This line of Dr. Dettmer's research is currently funded by the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center (OAIC) at Yale School of Medicine, and has been recently funded by the Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health & Aging Research Network (NIH/NIA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Yale Child Study Center Junior Faculty Development Fund. For more on this research, refer to Dr. Dettmer's complete Google Scholar profile.

Dr. Dettmer also works with human populations. She recently served as a member of the Hartford City Council Universal Basic Income (UBI) Task Force, which is developing a pilot UBI program set to begin in early 2023. She is also Co-PI of a research study funded by the Prepared Adult Initiative examining chronic stress across the school year in children in grades 1-8 as a function of school/educational setting. A third line of research focuses on analyzing the educational, therapeutic, and financial impacts of intensive in-school mental health services provided to K-12 students, in partnership with Effective School Solutions.

Dr. Dettmer is the Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Developmental Psychobiology and is the Past-President of Division 6 of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology, for 2023-24. She serves as the APA Division 6 representative to the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education. Dr. Dettmer was the 2017-18 APA Executive Branch Science Fellow, during which she worked at the National Center for Education Research at the Institute of Education Sciences, the independent research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Dettmer also served as the Chair of the Governing Council of Carroll Creek Montessori Public Charter School in Frederick, MD from 2016-18. In this position, she oversaw the governance of the school and maintained strong relationships with and regular reporting to the local county board of education. Consequently, Dr. Dettmer maintains an active interest in education research, with a focus on the educational environment and educational experience as an understudied early life experience.

Before her fellowship, Dr. Dettmer worked as a senior postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at NIH. There she led several research programs aimed at identifying the causes and consequences of long-term stress in nonhuman primate models of child development. Dr. Dettmer previously served on the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Committee on Animals in Research and as Executive Secretary of the American Society of Primatologists from 2016-18.

Dr. Dettmer earned her BS in zoology from the University of Washington in Seattle, and her MS (2007) and PhD (2009) in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.