Eve Van Cauter PhD

Eve Van Cauter, PhD, is the Frederick H. Rawson Professor Emeritus in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago, where she founded and directed the Sleep, Metabolism and Health Center (SMAHC) until 2017.

During the past two decades, research in her laboratory focused on the impact of decreases in sleep duration and quality on physical health and the interaction of sleep disturbances with the epidemic of obesity. Her group identified sleep loss and poor sleep quality as novel risk factors for obesity and diabetes. In recent years, her efforts have focused on understanding the mechanisms linking insufficient sleep and dysregulation of hunger and appetite. The group is also doing groundbreaking research on the impact of obstructive sleep apnea on the risk and severity of type 2 diabetes and on the metabolic implications of circadian misalignment as occurs in jet lag, shift work, abnormal eating patters and endocrine disease.

Eve Van Cauter has received the 2007 Gerald D. Aurbach Award  of the Endocrine Society, the 2007 Outstanding Research Award of the Sleep Research Society, the 2010 Peter C. Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the 2013 Distinguished Scientist Award of the Sleep Research Society and the 2016 Priscilla White Lectureship on Metabolism of the Joslin Diabetes Center. In June 2018, she gave the Opening Plenary Lecture of “SLEEP 2018”, the annual congress of sleep science and medicine in the USA. Eve Van Cauter is the author of nearly 300 scientific publications.