I am a psychological scientist focused on helping people sleep better and live longer lives.

Why is it that some people thrive and live long lives, whereas others falter, become ill, and die young? The breadth and complexity of this question has fascinated me for over fifteen years! Personality traits, particularly conscientiousness (self-control, planfulness, persistence, and organization) and low neuroticism (emotional stability and low negative affect) are robust predictors of consequential outcomes throughout the entire lifespan, including educational attainment, socioeconomic status, relationship satisfaction, and mental and physical health. My program of interdisciplinary research uses statistical, methodological, and theoretical tools from Social/Personality Psychology, Lifespan Development, and Behavioral Medicine to understand why.

This work incorporates sleep as a novel biological and behavioral mechanism linking personality traits early in the lifespan with multiple measures of later life health, including psychological well-being and self-rated health, cardiovascular biomarkers and disease risk, and all-cause mortality risk. I am currently continuing this program of research as an Assistant Professor and the director of the Personality Trajectories to Health and Sleep (PATHS) Lab in the Department of Psychology at North Dakota State University.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. After attending community college, I earned my BA (Psychology, 2010), MA (Psychology, 2012), and PhD (Social/Personality Psychology, 2016) from the University of California, Riverside. I then continued on to a National Institutes of Health-sponsored Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry and Center for Sleep and Circadian Science.

You can find me on bluesky or Twitter @drkatnaps. My published research is available at Google Scholar, My NCBI, and ORCID; my ongoing projects may be available at the OSF. In terms of larger service endeavors, I work hard to demystify pathways to higher education, and to increase engagement with scientific research. I have also Co-Chaired the Early Career Committee of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and I am on the Editorial Board of the Sleep Research Society’s newest journal, Sleep Advances; my reviewing history is available on Web of Science.

You can also email me at katherineduggan [at] gmail [dot] com, or reach out here.