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 2025.
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 other Fall, in odd-numbered years)
- PSYC 567: Personality Assessment (Spring 2025)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Psychology
Affiliate, Center for Social & Behavioral Science
Recent Publications
Junkins, EJ., Ogolsky, BG., & Derringer, J. (2024). Not Like Everybody Else but We're the Same: Psychosocial Variables Compared Across Diverse Sexual and Gender Identities. Journal of Personality. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12989
Junkins, E. J., Pantin, K., & Derringer, J. (2024). Personality across diverse sexual orientations and gender identities in an online convenience sample. Journal of Research in Personality, 109, Article 104466. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2024.104466
Junkins, E. J., Dugan, K. A., Chehab, S., Han, Y. S., Liu, T., Yuan, J., & Derringer, J. (Accepted/In press). Systematic review of queer and minority identities in romantic relationships research. Psychology and Sexuality. https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2024.2307045
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