Congratulations to Jared Saletin, PhD, who was recently awarded an R01 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Dr. Saletin is an awardee of the 2019 Advance-CTR Pilot Projects Program.

The Study

"Brain-Behavior Vulnerability to Sleep Loss in Children: A Dimensional Study of Attention and Impulsivity" (R01, NICHD)

Children often experience insufficient sleep during the school week, causing a detrimental impact on attention, learning, and behavioral regulation with real consequences for academic success. This project seeks to understand what factors bestow children vulnerability or resilience to these effects. 

Children between the ages of 10 to 13 enroll in a within-subjects study design consisting of a comprehensive evaluation of attention and impulsivity traits, sleeping at home on two different schedules (five nights of “sufficient” sleep (e.g., 10 hours) and five nights reduced by 25% (e.g., 7.5 hours in bed) to mimic a school week, and two MRI scans at Brown University.

If successful, this project will help teachers, clinicians, and parents predict how a given child responds to short sleep, thus paving the way for preventive measures to bolster academic, mental, and sociobehavioral health. 

How Advance-CTR Helped

My Pilot award from Advance-CTR (co-PI with Dr. Whitney Evans) provided me with unique opportunities to develop as a behavioral scientist monitoring sleep in adolescents at home. These skills, particularly those relating to doing research during the ever-changing landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic will serve me well in this award. Likewise, Advance-CTR was generous enough to offer a support letter for this project indicating my access to its key resources, namely administrative and research support that will aid in recruiting our sample of early adolescents. 

Addressing Health in RI

This project aims to better understand the consequences of insufficient sleep for young adolescents. Most teens experience sleep loss as a result of school schedules. The state of education in Rhode Island is very much in a state of flux, both independent of, and as a result of the ongoing pandemic. Understanding how school should be organized to support healthy sleep and healthy development for Rhode Island’s teens will help policy makers make informed choices as our students return to the classroom and beyond. 

This project involves collaboration between both Bradley Hospital and Brown University. Such ease of collaboration between institutions is a core feature of our Rhode Island based research community. It is that inter-institution, inter-disciplinary collaboration that is at the core of the Advance-CTR’s mission. I have been grateful to receive support from the Advance-CTR in the past and look forward to carrying that statewide mindset forward to this new research endeavor so we can best serve the youth of this state.