Amy Jo Stavnezer began her higher education at Allegheny College and after receiving a degree in Psychology with a minor in Biology, earned her Ph.D. in Biobehavioral Sciences from the University of Connecticut in 2000. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Skidmore College for two years, and is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at The College of Wooster, Ohio. In addition, she was the chairperson for the interdisciplinary Neuroscience program. Her teaching focuses on courses in Behavioral Neuroscience, Human Neuropsychology, and Psychopharmacology. She also enjoys teaching Introduction to Psychology, First Year Seminar and other interdisciplinary courses.
In terms of a research focus, Amy Jo Stavnezer is a behavioral neuroscientist and works mainly with mice and rats. Her areas of research interest include sex difference in performance on complex learning tasks and she has investigated the influence of both gonadal hormones and sex chromosomes on those differences, the impact of environmental influences (could be contaminants or stressors) on learning, memory and disease processes, and in better assessing rodent tasks and their extrapolation to humans. Recently, she has become more focused on questions concerning endocrine disrupting chemicals that are pervasive in our environment and waterways, BPA and Tricolcarban for example, that impact the gonadal hormones in different and meaningful ways.