Sleep in Child Development

For September 18, 2019

Please send on to your friends and neighbors.

Hi WN@TL Fans,

We spend one-third of our life asleep, if we’re lucky—and if we don’t have a newborn at home.

For new parents and older adults, when it comes to being bone tired, sleep’s the elixir that’s the fixer, and slumber is the metaphorical breeze to clear the fog of mental fatigue.

For kids, we think the job of children is to play.

But their real work might also be to sleep, perchance to rest, in order to give their brains time to braid together the neural networks so essential to their growth from infancy through childhood and into adolescence.

This week (September 18) Stephanie Jones of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness returns to WN@TL to with her talk on

“Sleep in Child Development: The A to Zzzs of Building a Healthy Brain.”

Here’s how Dr. Jones describes her talk:

“We all know that sleep is important, but in this talk I will focus on its particular importance during child development. I will discuss how sleep changes across childhood, the role it plays in cognitive and emotional function, and in the process of neural plasticity. I will highlight some of the exciting research we’re doing here at the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness.”

About the Speaker

Stephanie Jones, PhD is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an Associate Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry. She received her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008 and a Master’s of Science in Psychology in 2006.

She has a diverse research background spanning the neuroscience, physiology, and psychology of sleep. Her graduate research was focused on understanding effects of sleep loss in a long-distance migratory songbird (the white-crowned sparrow). Her current research is broadly focused on understanding sleep’s role in cognitive and emotional function during child development.

Although she is relentlessly promoting the importance of adequate sleep for health and optimal daytime function, her own sleep is habitually disrupted by a cat, a dog, a small boy and a snoring bed partner.

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Next week (September 25) we venture into the Abyss as Karthik Anantharaman of Bacteriology speaks on “Shining a Light on Dark Ocean Viruses.” As far as I can remember, this will be the first WN@TL talk ever on ocean viruses. These represent a sea change in how we view mobile genetic particles. In the courses I took in the early 1980s on plant, animal and bacterial viruses, I don’t ever recall hearing anything about viruses in the bounding main.

Karthik will describe the genomic, metabolic, and experimental analyses associated with viruses to implicate them in sulfur and amino acid metabolism and identify new processes that contribute to sulfur transformations in human and environmental systems.

He will also demonstrate engineering challenges associated with sampling viruses, especially under pressure in the deep-sea and use high-resolution videos collected from our fieldwork using submarines and robots to describe deep-sea hydrothermal systems.

And as we used to say: In Virus Veritas.

Hope to see you soon at Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.

Thanks again!

Tom Zinnen
Biotechnology Center & Division of Extension

UW-Madison