Christine Guardino, Ph.D. 

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (2014)

Assistant Professor, Social and Health Psychology

 

 

Contact:  christine.guardino@stonybrook.edu Office: Psychology B-354 Phone: (631) 632-7578

Research Interests:

I am an assistant professor specializing in the biopsychosocial processes underlying racial disparities in maternal and child health. My research focuses on the physiological and behavioral pathways through which chronic stress affects health, and the role that stress and resilience processes play in the disproportionate burden of adverse outcomes experienced by marginalized populations.

Current Research:

My primary research emphasis is in investigating the effects of chronic stress on health, particularly in women of reproductive age. I focus on understanding how various stressors influence maternal and child well-being. This research employs a biopsychosocial approach incorporating biological mechanisms for example, and my work underscores the significance of stress processes that accumulate in the reproductive years to shape maternal and child health outcomes. For example, my collaborators and I documented that dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis before conception predicted lower infant birth weight in a subsequent pregnancy (Guardino, et al., 2016). We have also demonstrated that financial stress and low subjective social status predict poorer health outcomes in the year after the birth of a child (Guardino and Dunkel Schetter, 2022; Guardino et al., 2017).

In parallel, I explore resilience as a multifaceted concept encompassing individual, social, and cultural resources that empower individuals to not only withstand stress but thrive under stressful circumstances. Recent coauthored publications consider personal, social, and cultural resilience processes in stressful life contexts (e.g., Hooker et al., 2023; Julian et al., 2023; Wilson et al., 2021) and demonstrate that resilience resources affect physical and mental health outcomes in the context of pregnancy, postpartum, and parenting.

My work integrates theory, biomarker data, and longitudinal analyses primarily using data from the Community Child Health Network (CCHN) study of families during the year after the birth of a child. I also served as project coordinator for the follow-up study on a subset of the CCHN cohort funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (Preconception and Prenatal Stress: Pathways to Child Biology and Behavior study.