Diane Lauderdale is the Louis Block Professor and Chair of the Department of Public Health Science at the University of Chicago. This department includes epidemiology, biostatistics and health services/health economics research. She is an epidemiologist whose research examines how behavioral and social factors influence health. Recent work has focused on sleep as a behavioral risk factor. This work includes studies of how people’s perceptions of sleep duration and disruption are related to objective sleep measures, studies of how social factors such as social connectedness and loneliness relate to sleep, and studies of how both sleep perceptions and objective measures are associated with health outcomes, including coronary artery disease, obesity, mortality, cortisol levels, and sensory perception. She was the first to report marked racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in objective sleep duration and disruption. Read more
She has also carried out a series of studies about the health of immigrants to the United States. These include studies of how pre-immigration conditions influence late-life health, how living in an ethnic enclave influences lifestyle risk factors, and discrimination effects on health. In this area, she demonstrated that Arab American women who gave birth in the months following 9/11, a period of unprecedented violence and discrimination for this group, had worse birth outcomes than similar women giving birth a year earlier, a difference not seen for other racial and ethnic groups. This study provided new evidence of stress effects on birth outcomes.
She directs the University of Chicago’s new MPH program and also the MS for Clinical Professionals in Public Health Sciences, a degree program that prepares clinicians to carry out research in clinical epidemiology and health services research. Public Health Sciences also has a PhD program. She is a past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and a trustee of NORC. She has received a University of Chicago Award for Distinguished Educator/Mentor in the Biological Sciences Division.
