About
Natasha Giddens, MD, MS
Physician-scientist. Psychiatrist for adolescents and adults. Researcher in addiction, sleep, and the neuroscience that connects them.
Biography
Dr. Natasha Giddens is a psychiatrist practicing in New York and Washington, DC, with subspecialty training in child and adolescent psychiatry and a clinical and research focus on addiction and sleep with co-occurring psychiatric disorders. She currently sees patients 15 and older and from July 2027 will see children from age 3. Her clinical approach reflects her research: careful measurement, sleep and substance use treated as drivers of illness rather than afterthoughts, and plans grounded in evidence and explained plainly. Outside the office she enjoys ballet, swimming, museums, biking, and hiking.
Education and training
- Fellowship, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · Zucker Hillside Hospital, Northwell Health, New York, 2025–2027 (completing June 2027)
- Residency, Psychiatry · University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, 2022–2025 · NIMH Outstanding Resident Award, 2024
- Postdoctoral research fellowship · Laboratory of Neuroimaging, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, NIH, under Dr. Nora Volkow, 2020–2022: brain imaging and national datasets on sleep in children and on opioid and alcohol use disorders
- MD · Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC, 2020 · NIH Intramural Research Program medical student fellowship
- MS, Biological and Physical Sciences · Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, New York, 2014
- Undergraduate and post-baccalaureate · Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a term at SKEMA Business School, Sophia Antipolis, France
- Recognition · ACNP Career-Spanning Mentorship Award, 2026; see all awards
Educated at Howard University College of Medicine
I trained as a physician at Howard University College of Medicine, one of the historically Black medical schools of the United States, founded in 1868 to educate doctors for people American medicine had declined to serve. That purpose is not history at Howard; it is present tense, and it shapes everything the school teaches.
Two educations happen there at once. The first is the one every medical school offers. The second is the hidden curriculum: whose pain is believed, whose symptoms are called noncompliance, who gets the benefit of the doubt. At Howard it is spoken aloud, because the teachers and the patients are the people it was written against. You learn to see disparity not as a statistic but as the reason the person in front of you waited so long to come.
Howard is also a university built by and for a people who made culture under conditions meant to prevent it; to be educated there is to learn that excellence and service were never separate pursuits. Its students come from across the African diaspora and beyond, and among them one learns early that there is no single way to be ill, to grieve, or to decide whether a doctor can be trusted.
Between my medical school years I spent a summer at the NIH, and after graduation I joined Dr. Nora Volkow’s laboratory. My first paper as first author showed that American children’s sleep differs measurably by race, ethnicity, and family income, and that the gaps open early and persist. I had been taught to look for exactly that.
I carry both educations into the consulting room. The science tells me what is likely. Howard taught me to ask what a life has made likely, and what it has made hard, and to treat the whole of it.
Research
Dr. Giddens’s research asks how sleep and substance use change the brain, and how those changes differ by age, sex, and social circumstance. Her first-author paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documented disparities in sleep duration among American children. With NIAAA colleagues she has studied disrupted brain dynamics in opioid and alcohol use disorder, rest–activity rhythms, dopamine receptor availability and methylphenidate response, and substance use in HIV. See Publications and Google Scholar.