Research
I started the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Lab at the University of Utah in 2019. We study what short and irregular sleep do to the body, and we test practical ways to help people sleep better.
What we study
Sleep and cardiometabolic health
How short sleep and off-schedule sleep contribute to high blood pressure, diabetes and weight gain. We recently finished a randomized trial of sleep optimization in adults with type 1 diabetes.
Getting more sleep
Programs that combine coaching and wearables for people who routinely sleep too little.
Sleep technology
What consumer trackers measure well, what they don’t, and when they help or get in the way.
Sleep in overlooked communities
Sleep health is not evenly distributed. We design these studies together with the people taking part.
Orthosomnia
When tracking your sleep makes it worse
In 2017 my colleagues and I wrote up a few patients who had something in common. Each wore a sleep tracker, each was convinced by the tracker that their sleep was bad, and each was sleeping worse because of the effort they were putting into fixing it. Some kept believing the device even after an overnight lab study showed they had slept fine.
We called it orthosomnia, a preoccupation with getting sleep exactly right.
The more anxious you become about getting “perfect” sleep, the harder it is to actually sleep.
I don’t think trackers are bad. Some of our own studies use them to help people get more sleep. But the numbers are estimates, and how you feel during the day tells you more than a sleep score does. More recently our group helped develop the Bergen Orthosomnia Scale, the first validated questionnaire for measuring it.
- Orthosomnia: Are some patients taking the quantified self too far? Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2017
- Development of a scale for measuring orthosomnia: the Bergen Orthosomnia Scale Frontiers in Sleep, 2025
- Signs of orthosomnia and what to do about it University of Utah Health
Studies that are enrolling
Sweet Dreams / Dulces Sueños
Sleep and heart health among Black, African immigrant, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, and Latina women in Utah. What we learn will shape a sleep program built for these communities.
CHARMS
Couples Health, Aging, Rhythms and Sleep. A two-year study of couples over 50 on how one partner’s sleep affects the other’s sleep and memory. Everything is done from home.
Eligibility and sign-up details are on the lab website.
Publications
I’ve published about 100 peer-reviewed papers, reviews and chapters. The complete, current list is on Google Scholar.
I was named to the Stanford/Elsevier list of the top 2% of scientists worldwide in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The list ranks researchers across all fields by how often their work is cited.
There is also a publication list on my University of Utah profile.