Faculty News
Biobehavioral Health
Dr. Patricia Barthalow Koch, associate professor of biobehavioral health and women’s studies, and Dr. Elizabeth Susman, professor of biobehavioral health and nursing, have received international attention for their research.
Koch was lead author of a paper entitled, “Feeling Frumpy”: The relationships between body image and sexual response changes in midlife women, which was published in the Journal of Sex Research. Koch and her colleagues received the 2005 Hugo Beigel Award for the Most Outstanding Research Paper published in the Journal of Sex Research.
Susman, together with Robert Matchock, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State Altoona, published research showing that fathers send “chemical cues” to their daughters to delay their sexual maturity. They found that girls without fathers reached sexual maturity faster than girls whose fathers were present. For the complete story, visit live.psu.edu/index.php?sec=vs_highlight&story=19397.
Both studies received attention from national and international media outlets.
