I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at North Dakota State University. I’m a health and social psychologist who works from a biopsychosocial perspective, asking how psychological processes, physiological stress responses, and social context work together to shape health.
Much of my research focuses on stress and pregnancy. My students, collaborators, and I study how stress, cardiovascular function (including blood pressure and heart rate variability), and neuroendocrine activity during pregnancy relate to fetal growth and birth outcomes, and how social and cultural experiences such as racism and acculturation contribute to disparities in those outcomes. Some of this work follows families over time, including a nine-year follow-up of children whose mothers were pregnant during the 2009 Red River flood.
I also study how people appraise and respond to stress more broadly, including challenge and threat responses, emotion, motivation, and coping. I use laboratory stress paradigms, including virtual reality, along with ambulatory, daily diary, and longitudinal methods, and I partner with health care organizations to recruit pregnant participants.
NDSU faculty profile | Email: clayton.hilmert@ndsu.edu
Selected Publications
Pierce, M. J., Duggan, K. A., Hilmert, C. J., Fuller, H. R., & Hamm, J. M. (2026). Dynamic benefits of finding the silver lining: Secondary control as a buffer against declines in well-being during COVID-19. Motivation and Emotion, 50(4), 688-701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-026-10195-9
Byron, G. S., Hilmert, C. J., & Strahm, A. M. (2025). Heart rate variability during pregnancy moderates the impact of depressive symptoms on fetal growth. Journal of Affective Disorders, 370, 381-384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2024.11.008
Strahm, A. M., Hilmert, C. J., Campos, B., Dvorak, R., & Schenker, M. (2025). Maternal blood pressure and birth weight associations in U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinas. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 31(3), 414-420. https://doi.org/10.1037/cdp0000649
Byron, G., Strahm, A., Bagne, A., & Hilmert, C. J. (2023). Using virtual reality to study the impact of audience size on cortisol responses to the Trier Social Stress Test. International Journal of Virtual Reality, 23(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.20870/ijvr.2023.23.1.7146
Strahm, A. M., Bagne, A. G., Rued, H. A., Larson, K. J., Roemmich, J. N., & Hilmert, C. J. (2020). Prenatal traumatic stress and offspring hair cortisol concentration: A nine year follow up to the Red River flood pregnancy study. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 113, 104579. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.104579
Rued, H. A., Hilmert, C. J., Strahm, A. M., & Thomas, L. E. (2019). The influence of stress on attentional bias to threat: An angry face and a noisy crowd. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(3), 943-950. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-018-1538-2
Hilmert, C. J., Kvasnicka-Gates, L., Teoh, A. N., Bresin, K., & Fiebiger, S. (2016). Major flood related strains and pregnancy outcomes. Health Psychology, 35(11), 1189-1196. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000386
Hilmert, C. J., Dominguez, T. P., Dunkel Schetter, C., Srinivas, S. K., Glynn, L. M., Hobel, C. J., & Sandman, C. A. (2014). Lifetime racism and blood pressure changes during pregnancy: Implications for fetal growth. Health Psychology, 33(1), 43-51. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031160
