ANDREW MCHILL, PHD
Our laboratory focuses on understanding why insufficient sleep and being awake during the night leads to poorer health and impaired cognitive performance. In particular, we study how eating when our body is promoting sleep and chronic short sleep influences energy expenditure, glucose metabolism, cardiovascular health, and overall body composition. With the invention of electrical lighting, humans have the ability to extend work and social activities far into the biological night, when the internal circadian timing system is promoting sleep. Wakefulness during this ‘circadian misalignment’ and disrupted sleep are associated with decreased mood and performance, impaired daytime sleep, excessive sleepiness, and a multitude of adverse health outcomes including metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and obesity. While recent evidence has begun to elucidate how eating during the night and disrupted sleep influences health, more information is needed about mechanisms and specifics of how diet, metabolism, and cardiometabolic health interact during circadian misalignment and short sleep. This is of particular importance in the shift-working population, as shift workers compose ~20% of the United States workforce, and the need for 24-hour operations is unavoidable.