Chris Depner, PhD, is assistant professor in the Department of Health & Kinesiology and runs the Sleep and Circadian Physiology Lab. His research aims to understand how the interactions between sleep and circadian physiology and nutrition contribute to metabolic health. Last year, he received a $3.8 million grant from the NIH to study people who don't sleep enough and shift their circadian clocks so they can get more sleep. He's one of the researchers working in the new HPER Research Center, which brings together COH faculty and students across a variety of disciplines:
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Why did you decide to pursue your line of research?
I chose to study sleep and circadian physiology because everybody has to sleep. It's a universal requirement for life. Poor sleep negatively impacts so many aspects of life, so if we can improve sleep through research, we have a high probability of positively impacting health and wellbeing.
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What sort of training did you need to get into your current specialty?
I am not a clinician, so really the key training is in conducting rigorous clinical research. I gained this through my PhD work at Oregon State University and a postdoctoral position in sleep and circadian physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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How would you give an “elevator pitch” about what you research, to someone who doesn’t have any background knowledge?
Our research is focused on understanding the reason why people like shiftworkers, who have short sleep and circadian misalignment, suffer from higher risk of diabetes and heart disease. Our goal is to create interventions that reduce this risk, even when sleep loss or shiftwork are unavoidable.
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What are you most proud of in your research career?
We have shown through a series of studies that even though weekend “catch-up” sleep makes you feel less sleepy, your body cannot recover on sleep in just a single weekend. So from a health standpoint weekend catch-up sleep does not work (although this is still a controversial topic). A key aspect of this issue is the interaction between sleep duration and the timing of sleep, relative to our internal circadian clock timing. We have many ongoing studies in this area.
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What’s your biggest research goal over the next five years?
We are conducting three clinical trials testing sleep and circadian based interventions and we hope to complete data collection and publish our findings. If these are successful, we will work with other researchers in the College of Health to move into the implementation stage of research.
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How does your research tie into the College of Health’s goal of redefining the human healthspan (adding more years to our life and life to our years)?
The data is clear—optimal sleep and circadian health promote better overall health. Poor sleep is linked to risk of heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, cancer, infection, risk of accidents, and poor cognitive performance. By improving sleep we can truly promote improvements across multiple dimensions of healthspan.