DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Social behavior, behavioral endocrinology, development, life history

BIOGRAPHY

Stacy Rosenbaum is a biological anthropologist who studies the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of social behavior. Her primary research focuses on a wild population of endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda that has been continuously monitored for more than 50 years. Using this and other long-term datasets, she and her lab members ask how social relationships form and persist, what they do for the individuals involved, and how they interact with physiology to shape health, longevity, and reproductive success. Much of her work has focused on male life histories and paternal care, as well as the developmental consequences of early-life adversity. By integrating behavioral, demographic, genetic, ecological, and physiological data, her research aims to clarify the evolution of social behavior in mammals generally, and in the hominid lineage specifically. Rosenbaum received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern and the University of Notre Dame and a faculty member at the University of Michigan before returning to Northwestern in 2026. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Leakey and Wenner-Gren Foundations. She is an Editorial Board member at the American Journal of Primatology, a member of the NIH-supported Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health and Aging Research Network, and a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow.  

RECENT COURSES

Dr. Rosenbaum will begin teaching during the 2027/28 school year.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Please visit Dr. Rosenbaum's Google Scholar page for a fully updated list of publications.