Our Winter 2024 Newsletter

Dec 20, 20244 min read

Welcome to our Newsletter!

It has been a busy year for the Circadian Mental Health Network, so please enjoy these highlights. For more detail on some of the things we have been working on, check out the other posts on our blog.

Mental Health and the Body Clock

Preview of our upcoming Mental Health and Body Clock survey

We received a fantastic response to our first Mental Health and the Body Clock survey.

Individuals with lived experience of mental health conditions and those with experience of disrupted circadian rhythms, clinicians, carers and many more gave us all the questions they have about mental health, sleep and circadian rhythms. Some of these questions the research community have already answered or are working on answering, and we will be sharing all that with the public soon.

We will be launching a secondary survey in early 2025 to help us narrow down the questions that were asked by the public. This will allow us to identify the Top 10 priorities for research in mental health, sleep and circadian science.

Please look out for more details coming soon! We will be updating you through our mailing list and through our website.

We will be sharing our entire process for this project in 2025.

Open Science and Data Sharing

In early 2024, we hosted "FAIR in Practice" workshops, training Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and Principal Investigators (PIs) in open science and data sharing within mental health, sleep, and circadian research. Attendee feedback was positive, helping us improve both the workshops and our communication strategies.

In January 2025, we’re excited to host the course FAIR Data in Chronobiology: Becoming an Open Data Champion, led by Bio_RDM. Designed for researchers in chronobiology, this workshop combines practical insights into Open Science, FAIR principles, and tools to streamline research workflows. Participants will explore good data management practices that benefit the circadian community and save valuable time. Feedback from past attendees highlights the course’s engaging delivery, practical exercises, and abundance of resources. Don’t miss this opportunity to advance your open science skills!

Our data experts have been working hard to enhance data-sharing practices within the Network. After assessing current practices, we’ve developed recommendations to improve data management and sharing, supporting both PIs and ECRs. Exciting updates are on the way, including new recommendations, an open data evaluation, publications, and tools—stay tuned!

Supporting Early Career Researchers

Across 2024, we have been very happy to support several ECRs in their networking and engagement activities, and you can read each of their stories in our ECR blog series.

This year we also launched our first pilot project funding call. The aim of this call was to support ECRs collecting pilot data to input into longer term projects. We wanted to support them in developing independent research with open science and lived experience involvement as crucial elements. There will be exciting updates on this coming soon!

We were also extremely excited to host our first ever ECR Webinar. This provided ECRs the opportunity to share their ongoing research with the Network, the wider research community and the public. If you missed the event, don’t worry, you can watch it here. This event will be the first of many, and you can look forward to more events in 2025!

Building A Sustainable and Inclusive Network

This year we have been extremely lucky to collaborate with the McPin Foundation and the MentalElf to communicate mental health, sleep and circadian science to the public. We have also continued to strengthen our partnerships with The Sleep Charity, Bipolar Scotland, BioClocksUK and other partners.

The Network website has been sharing opportunities from across the research community, this is an important way to engage with and support the community. We will continue to engage with the wider research community to build relationships which will help to create a sustainable and inclusive Network.

Featured Network Members

We’d like to take this opportunity to give a shout-out to our fantastic ECR Advisory Board. Their insight and expertise has helped to ensure the views of ECRs are heard across the Network. They have contributed ideas for events, helped us understand the value of the different funding options we have presented and more.

So a massive thank you to:

Aiste Steponenaite (University of Kent)
- Lecturer
Emily Stanyer (University of Oxford)
- Postdoctoral Researcher
Ingrid Buller-Peralta (University of Edinburgh)
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Jacob Crouse (University of Sydney)
- Research Fellow
Renske Lok (Stanford University)
- Postdoctoral Fellow

Thank you for all your fantastic insights.

Thank you for all your support in 2024, and we are excited to see what 2025 will bring!

You can also download a PDF version of our Newsletter below:

You can find out more about the work of the Network via our blog, mailing list and social media (if you would like to join our mailing list, please contact us via our Contact page). If you’d like to get involved with this work, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.