Meet the team- Dr Kate Porcheret

Dr Kate Porcheret, Third Century Research Fellow, School of Psychology, Manchester metropolitan University

In our first Meet the Team post we’re introducing Dr Kate Porcheret, a Third Century Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her current field of research in REM sleep fragmentation was born from her interest in circadian biology during her undergraduate degree. At the time, the idea that the body has an internal system governing the timing of nearly everything felt revelatory, and an interest in sleep and its fragmentation came as a natural extension of that.

Along the path she read a 2021 review by researcher Eus Van Someren that having restless REM sleep impairs the mechanisms in the brain that have been linked to the regulation of emotional distress. From there her interest in sleep and REM fragmentation naturally crossed over into the sort of work HASTE is doing and she soon joined the research group.

The members of HASTE have worked in a wide variety of settings with a range of different  professionals, from athletes to mountaineers and beyond. However a number of them focus their efforts in healthcare, social work and teaching. Kate is of course one of them, lending her expertise in sleep and REM sleep into the wider exploration of stress and trauma and the relationship that sleep has with our responses to stressful environments.

To further expand her efforts she set up the Manchester CARES cohort study, which follows students at MMU who are training for careers in nursing, teaching, social work, and social care professions with high levels of stress and trauma exposure as they move from training into the workplace. Alongside that, she’s currently running a lab study in which participants come into the lab for a stress test, sleep at home wearing an EEG, and return with the goal of furthering the understanding how REM sleep affects the stress response system.