For some students, all-nighters are a way to study; for Assistant Professor of Psychology Pamela Thacher, all-nighters are what she studies. She found out just how interested people are in the topic when the Associated Press did a feature story on a published study that established some preliminary data showing that pulling all-nighters is generally associated with lower GPAs.

The story ran in hundreds of newspapers, on radio and television newscasts across the country and was e-mailed from online news sites thousands of times. "It's pretty clear," Thacher notes, "that the story touched a nerve."

She's also investigated the relationship of all-nighters to procrastination. “Surprisingly, there is no obvious relationship,” she says. “For most students, an all-nighter is too painful to do very often, and procrastination appears to be happening on a near constant basis.” Her current research looks at frequent users of all-nighters to determine “the effects on their academic performance and on how healthy they are, and how they sustain this practice.”

Thacher is planning further studies, too. She would like to look at individual tolerance for sleep deprivation by studying a group of students beginning in their first year of college and following them through all four years of undergraduate work, and beyond, to their first jobs. Thacher also is interested in studying adults who sometimes endure all-nighters, such as accountants, attorneys, law-enforcement personnel and others, to see what their tolerance is and how it compares to the college-age population.

One of Thacher’s courses is Clinical Psychology, which has a community-based learning component. “This has been unbelievably rewarding both for me and for the students,” she says. “This kind of learning is transformative and I am so proud of this class and of their work.”

It is her students that Thacher most enjoys about her work. “They amaze me,” she says. It “They make me laugh every day. I love their energy. Sometimes they make me crazy but usually they just make me happy to be a professor.”