Katharina Wulff

Katharina Wulff, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of chronobiology and sleep at Umeå University in Northern Sweden where she established the Nordic Daylight Research Programme. She earned her Master’s degree in biology at the Free University Berlin in 1996, after returning from conservation projects at the Coastal Old Growth Forests of British Columbia, Canada. Wulff completed her doctoral thesis in human behavioural chronobiology at the Humboldt-University Berlin in 2001 and moved with a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship to Imperial College London, UK in 2002, bringing human aspects of sleep and circadian adaptation to the lab of prof. Russell Foster, while working in close collaboration with prof. Derk-Jan Dijk, Surrey Sleep Research Centre and Eileen Joyce, emeritus prof. of neurology at UCL.

Wulff moved to Oxford University in 2006, where she expanded her research on how sleep and circadian phenotypes impact physical and mental wellbeing. In 2019, the family relocated to Umeå in Northern Sweden to consider subarctic climate factors as means of temporal predictors that challenge human biology and necessitates thinking of a sunlight-adapted architecture. She recently served on the ‘Sleep, Circadian Rhythms and Mental Health Advisory Committee’ of the Wellcome Trust, and is a co-founder of the Light Collaboration Network (LCN), an past speaker of the Daylight Academy (DLA).