The PI for this K01 mentored career development award is a junior investigator focused on the intersection between epidemiology, sleep medicine, and women?s health. She examines the impact of sleep on health, using contemporary analytical approaches. Her career goal is to advance understanding of pathways through which inadequate sleep impairs cardiometabolic health in women. The proposed K01 mentored career development award includes a 5-year plan for training, education, and research aims that will provide the skills and experience the PI needs to become a highly successful and independent investigator. Insufficient sleep is a major public health burden, linked to cardiometabolic morbidity and mortality. More women experience poor sleep than men. These sex differences are likely endocrine-based. Indeed, sleep varies along the menstrual cycle, but whether these sleep variations affect cardiometabolic health remains unknown. This study will harness advanced epidemiologic methods to generate insight and hypothesis on the pathways that link sleep and cardiometabolic diseases in premenopausal women. The candidate will examine associations between patterns of sleep and clinically-relevant markers of cardiometabolic diseases. To accomplish these aims, the candidate will utilize existing data from the BioCycle study of young and racially diverse women. With a unique micro-longitudinal design, the BioCycle study followed women serially along two consecutive menstrual cycles. Collected information includes demographic data, medical history, anthropometric measures and serial assessments of blood, saliva, urine, and daily sleep diary entries. This mentored research scientist career award will focus on three learning objectives: 1) didactic education in sleep physiology and neurobiology; 2) training in biomarker assessment and analysis; and 3) didactic education and training in advanced quantitative methods and their application in sleep research. The PI will be supported by an accomplished, specifically-tailored and multidisciplinary mentorship team. She will also benefit from superb research infrastructure at Michigan Medicine, its Division of Sleep Medicine and the School of Public Health, which has launched many productive and impactful careers in sleep research.
Cardiometabolic diseases are the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in the US, but disproportionately burden women. Cross-sectional analyses have linked sleep duration to predictors of cardiometabolic diseases, but longitudinal data that examine the impact of sleep duration dynamics on cardiometabolic health are limited. Using a unique, micro-longitudinal cohort of young women with serial sleep and cardiometabolic measures during 2-month periods, this study will harness contemporary epidemiologic methods to examine links between patterns of sleep duration and key predictors of cardiometabolic diseases.
