Adam to Discuss Work on Sleep, Equity
Northwestern University's Emma Adam, one of the world’s leading researchers on stress, race, and sleep, will discuss Sleep Equity: Good Sleep as a Resource (and a Right?) during the One SESP Graduate Student Dinner and Discussion.
Graduate students from all SESP programs will break into small interdisciplinary dinner groups following the talk to discuss the implications of her research in their personal, academic, and professional lives.
The event is from 5 to 6:25 p.m. Thursday, May 9. All regular 6 p.m. graduate classes will start at 6:30 p.m. Register for One SESP.
Adam, professor of human development and social policy at the School of Education and Social Policy and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, studies the wellbeing of children, adolescents, and young adults.
Sleep quality, including the number of hours, impacts everything from relationships and behavior to academic performance. Yet many people – including high school students, graduate students, and, yes, even professors -- don’t get enough sleep.
“Less known is the robust finding that individuals of color, and particularly Black Americans, get less sleep on average than white Americans,” Adam says. Sleep is partially a behavioral choice, but the amount and quality of sleep can be determined by factors that we can’t easily control, including housing and neighborhood quality, work and school schedules and travel times, and importantly, exposure to stress.
These factors that wreak havoc on sleep are not equally or equitably distributed in U.S. society, contributing to an unequal distribution of sleep and its emotional, behavioral, cognitive and health consequences.
In her talk, Adam will stress the importance of looking at the world through a “sleep equity” lens and provide tips on how to improve your own sleep and the sleep of those around you.