PhD Scholarship available through a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Ideas Grant: Daily circadian rhythm tracking and light therapy to improve sleep

We are seeking an outstanding PhD candidate to undertake a program of research within a broader NHMRC Ideas Grant entitled: Personalised daily body-clock tracking and circadian light therapy retiming to improve sleep, performance, health and safety. This exciting project is supported by a large, multidisciplinary investigator team from the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute: Sleep Health (Flinders University), the Medical Device Research Institute (Flinders University), and the Behaviour-Brain-Body Research Centre (University of South Australia).

The overall project aims to refine and test a new high performance wearable sensor method for daily circadian rhythm tracking to better guide when blue light should be present and avoided for optimal daily body-clock adjustments. Despite major advances in the mechanistic understanding of the body-clock system, proven and practical methods for daily circadian tracking do not exist. Thus, circadian sleep medicine entirely relies on guessing when circadian problems warrant light therapy, and when to time them. This project aims to solve one of the biggest ongoing clinical problems in sleep medicine and, in future, could also revolutionise circadian tracking for other health-related applications.

This PhD scholarship is based at the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute: Sleep Health (Flinders University) in Adelaide supervised by Prof Peter Catcheside and Drs Hannah Scott and Phuc Nguyen.

The scholarship includes:

• a stipend valued at $33,990* per annum tax free, for 3 years.
• a Research Training Program Fee Offset Scholarship to cover tuition fees for Australian Citizens, NZ Citizens and Permanent Residents.

To be eligible for the award of this scholarship a student must:

• Be an Australian citizen; or New Zealand citizen; or have been granted permanent resident status; and
• meet PhD admission requirements including: have an Australian Honours degree Class 1 or 2A or equivalent qualification (at least AQF Level 8), including a research component of at least 6 months’ full-time study achieving Distinction (75%) OR including evidence of equivalent research experience, such as a substantial first-author refereed publication or track record as an investigator on a competitive grant; and
• be available to commence as a full-time PhD student at Flinders University in semester 1, 2024.

It is desirable for applicants to have:

• Disciplinary background in Psychology, Physiology and other health fields, Engineering, or Data Analytics.
• Experience in sleep and/or circadian rhythm research.