Many individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, like autism, have sleep problems. Some estimates suggest up to 80% of autistic youth may have sleep disturbances.​ Disturbances like troubles falling asleep and night awakenings are documented as early as infancy in autism and continue into adulthood. Despite sleep issues being one of the most common health complaints in neurodevelopment disorders, it is understudied. My PhD research focused on why these sleep problems frequently occur in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders and how they impact their day-to-day functioning.

1) I turned to genetic approaches to investigate potential biological reasons for frequent sleep disturbances in autism. The genes we inherit from our parents carry instructions to produce different traits, like our eye colour. I study large genetic variations where individuals have one or more genes missing or multiple copies of the same gene— like removing or adding ingredients to a recipe. Sometimes the deletion or addition of genes has no detectable impact, other times it has serious health consequences. I've led a few projects to uncover genetic variations that impact both neurodevelopmental disorders (like autism) and sleep disturbances. 2) I led the first longitudinal study in the autism field investigating if sleep problems early in childhood would be linked to difficulties developing crucial cognitive skills during later school-age, like executive functioning. Executive functioning is a cognitive process that enables us to plan, focus our attention on multiple tasks and inhibit our behaviours. These cognitive skills are crucial for successful social development, yet executive functioning difficulties are documented in autistic youth and adults. My project demonstrated that autistic toddlers who had difficulties falling asleep and shorter sleep duration in early elementary school compared to their autistic peers had greater difficulties developing executive functioning in middle school(like regulating behaviour). My research suggests early sleep interventions could be one way to ameliorate executive functioning difficulties in autism.

I disseminate my work to the public as much as possible. I'm specifically interested in getting my research out to autistic individuals and families, hence always value the opportunity to work with community groups to translate my research. Below is some recent coverage of my research in various media outlets. For any media inquiries feel free to contact me here. Article 1: Autistic people at increased genetic risk of sleep problems Article 2: Autistic children’s sleep problems linked to behavioral regulation issues Interview with the Montreal Neurological Institute, 2021 The Autism Advocate Parenting Magazine recently created an infographic of our 2022 study published in Translational Psychiatry. To read the full article you can download a PDF or subscribe.

Although I have finished my PhD and will slowly be exiting the sleep world, I have a few projects that i'm excited to wrap up soon: Insomnia Book Chapter: I wrote my first book chapter about the history of insomnia and genetics with Dr. Philip Gehrman from the University of Pennsylvania. This chapter is part of a commissioned book series summarizing the landscape of genetic discoveries related to sleep in human and animal models. The book is currently in press and will be available to download shortly. Article on the interplay between sleep, cognition and CNVs in the General Population: The final chapter of my PhD is my largest study yet. Using data from the UKBiobank, I was able to analyze how large genetic variations (CNVs) were related to physiological and self-reported sleep in over +500,000 adults in the general population. I was also able to detect if sleep problems exacerbated cognitive functioning difficulties that were related to known genetic risk scores. This work is currently under journal review and my preliminary findings were presented at the 2022 World Sleep Conference in Rome. Multidimensional sleep profiles project: There are many cognitive, health, behavioural and lifestyle factors that are related to sleep problems. But how can we determine which group of factors are most related to each other and specific sleep disturbances? This is a major gap in sleep research. I am super excited to be working on a team led by scientists Dr. Aurore Perrault and Dr. Valeria Kebets, who are using machine-learning approaches to detect how hundreds of factors and multiple sleep problems relate to one another. Using these data-driven methods we can uncover distinct profiles of people who are less or more at risk for developing various sleep issues and how their brain functions may differ. In the future, we hope this multidimensional approach can enable us to detect individuals at risk for sleep problems more quickly and prescribe tailored treatment. Preliminary research from this project was presented by Dr. Aurore Perrault at the 2022 Organization for Human Brain Mapping Conference and the European Sleep Research Society conference.