Professor Melissa Hines 

Melissa Hines is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology (SDP) and Director of the University’s Hormones and Behaviour Research Lab. She is one of the world’s leading experts on human gender development, focusing particularly on the interaction between biological and social factors in gender development. She supervises for the first year psychology paper and several other papers in the psychology stream.

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 behaviour 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.

Department profile