Research Interests
- Individual differences
- Measurement
- Gender and sexuality
- Behavior genetics
I am an interdisciplinary scientist, working at the intersection of personality psychology and molecular genetics. My dual expertise in genetic methods and psychological assessment has led to the development of a research program organized around understanding how people, for all the fundamental similarities across members of our species, display such remarkable diversity and flexibility of behavior.
I am not accepting new graduate students to begin in Fall 2024.
Education
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Institute for Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado
Psychology, Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Psychology, B.S., Carnegie Mellon University
Courses Taught
- Psyc 408: Human Behavior Genetics (offered every Fall)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Affiliate, Center for Social and Behavioral Science
Recent Publications
Bucknor, B. A., & Derringer, J. (2022). Exploring the utility of current polygenic scores in capturing resilience. Psychiatric Genetics, 32(1), 15-24. https://doi.org/10.1097/YPG.0000000000000300
23andMe Research Team, Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, & LifeLines Cohort Study (2022). Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals. Nature Genetics, 54(4), 437-449. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01016-z
Hannikainen, I. R., Hudson, N. W., Chopik, W. J., Briley, D. A., & Derringer, J. (2020). Moral migration: Desires to become more empathic predict changes in moral foundations. Journal of Research in Personality, 88, Article 104011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2020.104011
Border, R., Smolen, A., Corley, R. P., Stallings, M. C., Brown, S. A., Conger, R. D., Derringer, J., Donnellan, M. B., Haberstick, B. C., Hewitt, J. K., Hopfer, C., Krauter, K., McQueen, M. B., Wall, T. L., Keller, M. C., & Evans, L. M. (2019). Imputation of behavioral candidate gene repeat variants in 486,551 publicly-available UK Biobank individuals. European Journal of Human Genetics, 27(6), 963-969. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41431-019-0349-x
Briley, D. A., Livengood, J., Derringer, J., Tucker-Drob, E. M., Fraley, R. C., & Roberts, B. W. (2019). Interpreting Behavior Genetic Models: Seven Developmental Processes to Understand. Behavior genetics, 49(2), 196-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-018-9939-6