Shelby Stowe, a PhD candidate in Computational and Applied Math, has been awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship under the National Institutes of Health T32 Transdisciplinary Training in Sleep and Circadian Rhythms Training Grant at the University of Colorado Boulder (PI Dr. Kenneth Wright, Jr.).
Ms. Stowe’s T32 research project is entitled “Data-Driven Mathematical Modeling of Sleep Consolidation in Early Childhood.” The project will be supervised by Ms. Stowe’s PhD advisor, Dr. Cecilia Diniz Behn (Mines, AMS). Other collaborators on this project include Dr. Christina Athanasouli (Georgia Institute of Technology), Dr. Victoria Booth (University of Michigan), and Dr. Monique LeBourgeois (University of Colorado Boulder). The project will utilize existing longitudinal data from young children as they transition from habitually napping during the day (biphasic sleep) to consolidating sleep into a single nighttime sleep episode (monophasic sleep). These data will be used to constrain a physiologically-based mathematical model of the sleep/wake regulatory network to study the contribution of developmentally-mediated changes in the homeostatic sleep drive to early childhood sleep patterns, as well as on the timing and duration of the transition from biphasic to monophasic sleep. Insights from this research will contribute to establishing a theoretical framework for sleep regulation and consolidation across early childhood development.