Cassandra Pattinson
Dr Cassandra Pattinson is a sleep and circadian rhythms researcher who writes about how everyday behaviours like screen use, routines and light exposure shape health across the lifespan. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Child Health Research Centre in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Queensland, and her pieces for UQ News translate her own research into clear, practical guidance, especially for families navigating children’s sleep.
Child sleep and screens before bed
Pattinson’s most distinctive work for UQ News focuses on the intersection of child sleep, screen time and household routines. Drawing on a large national study of more than 3,300 families with children under six, she highlights how different types of screens affect when young children fall asleep, how long they sleep and how well they function the next day. She reports that for every additional hour of handheld device use per day, two-year-olds went to bed almost 30 minutes later. For three-year-olds, each extra hour of handheld screen time was linked to later bedtimes, shorter overall sleep and greater difficulties functioning the following day.
Her coverage emphasises that both handheld devices such as phones and tablets and static screens such as televisions are associated with less sleep and later sleep timing across most ages from one to five years, with handheld devices showing stronger and more consistent effects. She also underscores the impact of timing: children who used any type of screen more frequently in the two hours before bed had shorter sleep, later bedtimes and more sleep problems than children with limited or no screen use in that window. Rather than stopping at high-level warnings, she uses these findings to argue that guidance should focus not only on how much screen time children have, but also where, when and on what devices they use screens.
A hallmark of her writing is the move from data to concrete action. In her UQ News article on children’s sleep and screens, she sets out specific steps caregivers can take: removing screens from bedrooms to reduce late-night use and conflict around devices, building a predictable and calming pre-bed routine with play, movement, reading and bath time, and limiting bright handheld screens held close to the face in the evening because their light can interfere with the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin. This blend of quantified risk, explanation of mechanisms and practical routines distinguishes her coverage from more generic health reporting that might highlight screen-time totals without showing how to change day-to-day habits.
Making sleep a priority in uncertain times
Beyond early childhood, Pattinson also writes about sleep as a core pillar of coping with wider social stress. In a piece titled During this uncertain time, making sleep a priority is more than self-care – it's essential, co-authored with colleagues, she frames sleep not as an optional wellness extra but as fundamental to maintaining health and functioning during periods of uncertainty. The title alone reflects a consistent stance in her public writing: sleep is positioned as essential infrastructure for mental and physical health, not merely a lifestyle choice.
This perspective links closely to her research focus on how circadian rhythms and sleep affect wellbeing and recovery across the lifespan. Her commentary treats sleep as both a clinical and a practical issue, connecting the science of circadian regulation to everyday challenges such as disrupted routines, heightened anxiety and changing work or family demands. In this way her coverage often operates at two levels at once, explaining why sleep matters biologically while offering realistic levers people can use to protect it.
Smartphone use, circadian rhythms and mental health
Pattinson’s journalism is underpinned by an active research program on technology use, sleep and mental health, particularly in adolescents and young adults. Her work on the Effects of Smartphone Use on Sleep and Mental Health in Young Adults investigates how patterns of smartphone use and the content people consume, including news and social media, relate to sleep and mental health outcomes. This research focus extends the themes she addresses in UQ News beyond young children, positioning her as a specialist on digital habits and sleep across different life stages.
Her affiliation with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child reflects a sustained interest in how digital environments shape children’s health and development, including phenomena such as “social jet lag” associated with irregular sleep timing in under-six-year-olds with high screen exposure. When she communicates these topics for general audiences, she tends to foreground the size of observed effects (for example, minutes of bedtime delay per hour of device use) and to connect them to everyday behaviours like keeping devices in bedrooms or using phones close to the face at night. This focus on quantification and mechanism makes her coverage particularly suited to stories that need both empirical grounding and a clear behavioural narrative.
Evidence-based, accessible health communication
Across her writing, Pattinson’s through-line is turning complex sleep and circadian science into straightforward, actionable advice without losing the nuance of the data. Her UQ News pieces are tightly anchored in original research, frequently citing sample sizes, age ranges and specific behavioural outcomes, while the prose remains direct and free of technical jargon. She focuses on concrete elements of daily life—bedroom environments, pre-sleep routines, screen placement and timing—rather than abstract health messaging, giving her work a practical feel that is unusual even within health coverage.
Because she writes as a researcher who is also a communicator, her stories often carry both the authority of subject-matter expertise and the accessibility of consumer health journalism. Themes recur across outlets: the health consequences of disrupted sleep, the role of digital devices in shifting sleep timing, the importance of consistent routines, and the positioning of sleep as foundational to mental health and recovery rather than a secondary concern. Taken together, her body of work offers a distinctive blend of empirical depth and clear, behaviour-focused guidance on sleep, screen time and wellbeing from early childhood through young adulthood.
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