Professor Melissa Hines

Stub body

Professor Melissa Hines specialises in human gender development and is the Director of the Gender Development Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. With an educational and professional background in personality and developmental psychology, as well as neuroscience and clinical practice, Professor Hines brings a distinct, multifaceted perspective to her teaching and research.

Professor Hines received a B.A. in Psychology from Princeton University, where she was in the first group of women enrolled as undergraduates.  This pioneering experience may have kindled her interest in gender. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), focusing her dissertation research on the gender-related behavior of women whose mothers had taken the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) during pregnancy.  Subsequently, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neuroendocrinology and Neuroscience at the UCLA Brain Research Institute and a Visiting Scientist, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Primate Research Centre.  In these settings, she worked on developing animal models of hormonal influences on neural and behavioural development that would translate to the human condition. Before joining the Faculty at Cambridge, Professor Hines was on the academic staff of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA and of the Departments of Psychology at the University of London, and City University, London, where she also directed the Behavioural Neuroendocrinology Research Centre.   She is a Past-President of the International Academy of Sex Research and a recipient of the Shephard Ivory Franz Award for Distinguished Teaching at UCLA.