Darby Saxbe Digs into Relationships’ Effects on Human Biology

In her current work, the University of Southern California psychologist is examining how the transition to fatherhood affects men’s brains.

Written byShawna Williams

| 4 min read

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ABOVE: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Darby Saxbe got her start in psychology research early. A self-described “nerdy kid,” she did a science fair study in seventh grade in which she gave left-handed people who wrote with a “hooked” posture and right-handed people a visual test to compare their perception in their left and right visual fields. “I’ve always been sort of curious [about] what makes people different from each other,” she explains.

Growing up in the college town of Oberlin, Ohio, it was easy to envision a career in academia, but Saxbe wasn’t completely sold. When she enrolled at Yale University in 1995, she originally majored in English. After realizing that career prospects for would-be English professors weren’t promising, she gravitated back toward psychology, and graduated with a double major. She moved to New York, working for tech startups and as a freelance writer, but the crash of the dot-com ...

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Meet the Author

Shawna Williams
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Shawna was an editor at The Scientist from 2017 through 2022. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Colorado College and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, she worked as a freelance editor and writer, and in the communications offices of several academic research institutions. As news director, Shawna assigned and edited news, opinion, and in-depth feature articles for the website on all aspects of the life sciences. She is based in central Washington State, and is a member of the Northwest Science Writers Association and the National Association of Science Writers.
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