When we talk about the transformative experience of becoming a parent, we almost always talk about mothers. Research on birth and parenting has focused overwhelmingly on how women’s bodies and brains change, while popular culture still casts dads as well-meaning bumblers muddling through a diaper change. The old assumption persists: mothers are natural parents, and fathers are something less.

In “Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives,” clinical psychologist and professor of psychology Darby Saxbe, Ph.D., inspired in part by her own hands-on, solo father, draws on fifteen years of studying fathers to overturn that assumption. Sharing new findings from her own laboratory at the University of Southern California, from neuroimaging scans and hormone samples to observations of fathers with their children, along with interviews with dozens of first-time dads and scientists around the world, Saxbe shows that “dad brain” is real: becoming a father changes men’s brains and bodies, too. Along the way she explores how fatherhood varies across cultures, why the panic over low testosterone misreads the science, how paternity leave policy can draw fathers in, and what hands-on caregiving means for our ideas about masculinity.

Saxbe argues that taking fatherhood seriously as a science is not a distraction from mothers’ needs but a path to equal partnership, with benefits for children, families, workplaces, and society. Saxbe will be in conversation with Richard V. Reeves, Ph.D. (FAN ’26), the founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Of Boys and Men.