Joshua R. Freeman, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Joshua R. Freeman, Ph.D., M.P.H., joined the Metabolic Epidemiology Branch (MEB) as a postdoctoral fellow in November 2021. He received a B.S. in biology and Japanese from Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and an M.P.H. from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. In 2021, Dr. Freeman earned his Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received the 2023 NCI Director's Innovation Career Development Award. 

Poor Sleep Associated with Prostate Cancer Risk

Wrist-worn accelerometers measured sleep in 30,000 men in the UK Biobank.

During his doctoral training, Dr. Freeman joined the Epidemiology Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as a predoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Sunni L. Mumford. He completed his doctoral research within the Effects of Aspirin in Gestation and Reproduction (EAGeR) cohort and evaluated the association between preconception sleep characteristics and reproductive health outcomes including risk of anovulation, fecundability, and pregnancy loss.

In MEB, Dr. Freeman is continuing to develop his research program investigating the role of sleep timing and circadian disruption in health outcomes. Specifically, his research investigates the association between sleep and circadian exposures and cancer risk. In addition, he plans to conduct methodologic studies to better understand the variability in key exposure metrics in this area of study and to develop new modeling approaches for investigating behavioral exposures that may lead to circadian disruption and increased cancer risk. His mentor is Charles E. Matthews, Ph.D., a senior investigator within MEB.