Martha McClintock

Martha McClintock is an American psychologist best known for her discoveries of the existence of human pheromones and menstrual synchrony. She is the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago and is the Founder and Director of the Institute for Mind and Biology.

McClintock was born in Pasadena, California, and obtained her Bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1970. It was while at Wellesley that she conducted a research study of menstrual synchrony in women living in a college dormitory. It was found that women living together in a close community without the presence of males synchronized their menstrual cycles with each other. The McClintock effect of menstrual synchrony is named after this study, which was published in the journal Nature in 1971.

McClintock obtained her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and obtained a faculty position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago in 1976. She also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Comparative Human Development, the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, and the Committee on Neurobiology. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine in the National Academy of Sciences, and has received numerous awards and distinctions for her groundbreaking research.

In 1999, she founded the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago, a research institute designed to foster transdisciplinary research in mind-body interactions and the biological basis of behavior. This innovative Institute enabled the creation of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research (CIHDR), a multi million dollar initiative to explore and understand why African American women have a higher incidence of mortality from breast cancer than Caucasian women. McClintock is Co-Director of the Center.