A record-setting amount of $1.7 billion in research funding and awards was granted to schools in the CU system, with $18.9 million awarded to UCCS for the fiscal year.
The funds were separated into 91 different grants that were sent to colleges and departments across the campus, according to a UCCS spokesperson. Out of the grants, $3.8 million from the Department of Defense is going toward investigating how to reduce stress for military-affiliated parents.
Michele Okun, associate professor of research and director of the UCCS Sleep and Biobehavioral Health Research Lab, received the grant, named the Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program Lifestyle and Behavioral Health Interventions Research Award, in June and has been conducting research ever since.
“We live in Colorado Springs. There’s so many military installments, [and] I started digging a little deeper into pregnant military-affiliated people, and I realized this is a really big area and they suffer extraordinary stressors beyond what civilians do, and very little work has been done in that population,” Okun said.
Through this study, Okun and her research team are investigating the effectiveness of smart bassinets in how they can improve sleep patterns in infants and how it positively impacts the mental health of the birthing parent.
The smart bassinets mirror parental behaviors such as mimicking the swaying motion of parents swaying their babies back and forth, according to Okun.
“It’s helping the baby learn how to self soothe,” Okun said. “It’s utilizing a couple of normal parental behaviors that parents would engage in to kind of quiet down and clam down their baby, but it’s doing it without, hopefully, allowing the mom and or dad, whatever gender they may be, to stay sleeping, especially at night,” Okun said.
With nearly 30 years of experience as a sleep scientist, research on mental health, stress, pregnancy and how sleep affects immune health or immune responsivity. Okun is grateful for the opportunity to support the mental health of military-affiliated pregnant women, calling it a “labor of love” that you don’t get paid for all the time you spend creating, producing and coordinating the grant application.
According to Okun, this grant will provide opportunities for additional funding from the DOD and the National Institute of Health to answer and address additional questions likely to arise from the study.
Okun’s research team is made up of UCCS research assistants, and two collaboration co-investigators, one from Cornell Medical School and one from the University of Virginia, who will oversee lab work and data collection.
The funding will be allocated for salary, participant payments, equipment database management at the University of Virginia and lab measurements of biological activity in pregnant women at Cornell University.
There are currently no students on the research team. Okun hopes to open recruitment to students based on her experience with a R15 grant from the National Institutes of Health that focused on giving undergraduate students experience in biomedical research.
“I think I had over 40 undergrads come through the study and work on it in some capacity, so that was really fun to give students that. I’m hoping we can get at least a couple of students to work on this and help with organizing, recruiting and doing whatever needs to be done,” Okun said.
Two psychology graduate students working on the research will be conducting structured clinical interviews to assess mental health disorders in study participants.
Students can find more information on the BioFrontiers website or by visiting the BioFrontiers Research Center main office in the Osborne Science and Engineering Building in unit A452.
A UCCS sign. Photo by Josiah Dolan.