Eva Unternaehrer (PhD)

After my Bachelor and Masterstudies in Psychology, as well as a PhD on psychosocial stress and epigenetics at the University of Basel, I received a postdoctoral mobility fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation to conduct a Postdoc at the Michael Meaney Lab at McGill University in Canada, where I studied different psychobiological aspects of parenting and their relevance for child neurodevelopment. When I became pregnant, I decided to move back to Switzerland, to give my child the opportunity to grow-up with family and friends. After an insightful baby-career break (studying parenting without being a parent myself can be hard at times), I started a second postdoc at the Lab of Prof. Jens Pruessner at the University of Konstanz to examine metabolic aspects of early life adversity and its effect on the endocrine and autonomic stress response. In 2019 I was able to return to Basel to work as a Senior Researcher in the lab of Prof. Christina Stadler at the Child- and Adolescent Research Department of the Psychiatric University Hospitals.

I am a proud generalist and have many research interests, ranging from psychobiology, to psychosocial stress, to parenting and child development. Currently, I am trying to integrate these facets of my past research to investigate how challenges and opportunities that have emerged in the family environment during the past few years impact the parent-child relationship and child socio-emotional development and behaviour. One of these novel factors include increased digital media use. I hope that my research will help identifying families at risk to suffer adverse consequences from these novel challenges and framing interventions for these families.

Download Curriculum Vitae Dr Eva Unternaehrer

ORCID: 0000-0002-3507-1883
ResearchGate
Google Scholar

Projects on Family Digital Media Use

• SMARTIES (Study on Mobile Device Attraction, Relationship Ties, Social Interactions, Emotion Regulation, and Stress" (UPK Basel)
• SWIPE: Swiss Study on Preschool Screen Exposure (national collaboration between FHNW, HETSL, HfH, PHTG, USI, UKBB, UPK Basel, ZHAW)
• CP-Screen: Parental Screen Use Profiles as Predictors for Child Behavioural Problems (TARGet Kids!, Sickkids, Toronto, Canada)

Other Projects (Selected)

• familyReBel: Familiäre Ressourcen und Belastungsfaktoren
• Masked Emotions: Child emotion recognition in masked and non-masked faces
• Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment Project (Michael Meaney Lab, McGill University)
• Early Life Adversity and Metabolic Health (AG Pruessner, Uni Konstanz)
• Epigenetics of posttraumatic stress disorder (AG Elbert, Uni Konstanz)
• Early parenting, epigenetics and child health (Wibke Jonas, Karolinska Institute, Sweden)

Please find a list of my publications on Google Scholar