2024 marks the third year of the Fordham University Sleep Study, also known as FUSS. This research project is led by principal investigator Dr. Tiffany Yip. It is a five-year longitudinal study part of Fordham University’s Youth Developments in Diverse Contexts Lab (YDDC). Yip has been running the lab for nearly 20 years, and FUSS began three years ago. According to the FUSS website and YouTube channel, Yip began doing research surrounding sleep on high school students when she realized the Fordham undergraduates had worse sleep habits than high schoolers.
“Sleep touches upon almost every aspect of functioning that we care about: physical health, mental health, academic health, social relationships and just about everything,” said Yip.
Lab Manager Maddie Bradley, B.A., began working in the lab in June 2023, only a few weeks after graduating from Emmanuel College. She explained that this research has three main objectives:“Aim 1: Determine daily and longer-term impact of sociodemographic and environmental stress on racial sleep disparities during the college transition and over time. Aim 2: Identify racial sleep disparities as an explanatory pathway for sociodemographic and environmental stress to impact health, academic and physiologic biomarker (inflammation and telomere length) outcomes. Aim 3: Investigate ethnic/racial identity (ERI) as a dynamic moderator of the daily and longer-term effects of stress on sleep, and of sleep on health and academic outcomes.”
According to Yip, over 800 Fordham first-year students have participated in the study in between 2021 and now.
“At this point, we have many juniors in the study, so when they graduate next year it will be especially bittersweet to have our first cohort of FUSS participants graduate. We will have to do something special for them!”
Yip also explained that “FUSS is the only study of its kind… Data on changes in sleep over four years will contribute a lot of new information to how educators and policymakers think about the value of sleep for student mental, physical and academic health.”
Tenzing Choeying, FCRH ’25, and Ada Wu, FCRH ’26, are two undergraduate research assistants involved in FUSS.
“I have been in the lab for two years so far, and it has been a journey. I have a small community within Fordham that I call the ‘FUSS fam.’ It has also been inspiring to have a female Asian American in the position that I hope to be in the future,” said Choeying. “I feel more motivated than ever to continue my studies in psychology and go to graduate school.”
“In the FUSS lab, [research assistants] can get many experiences with different parts of conducting research. As a big project, we do all kinds of work like recruiting participants, collecting data, data coding process… Exploring different steps and finding the ones you enjoy doing is great,” said Wu. “Now, I am mainly interacting with participants and data coding. To me, being a research assistant is not only about doing work but planning future goals. With my experience working with Dr. Yip for two years, I have gained a better understanding of research and developed my own research interests in minority youths’ identity development.”
While the lab is focused on studying students’ sleep, it is also a learning experience for undergraduate researchers.
“One of the things that I love most about the lab is that students work collaboratively, and research assistants who have been in the lab longer are eager and excited to train new lab mates,” said Yip. “Over the years, the YDDC lab has been a space where students have developed meaningful practical research experience, learned new data collection and coding skills and, of course, built friendships.”
