The College Sleep Study (also known as the "Prospective Study") took place at Brown University from 2010-2014.

This project was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health with several goals, including examining whether genetic variations were implicated in the link between insufficient sleep and depressed mood. Each year, the project spanned the last few weeks of high school through the first 10 weeks or so of the first year at Brown. Incoming Brown first-year students were invited in May to complete a survey about their sleep patterns and other variables, such as circadian phase preference, mood, and so forth. Students who completed this survey were invited to join the extended phase of the study when they arrived at Brown for their first year. This extended phase included providing a blood or saliva sample for genetics determination, completing daily diaries of sleep and other behaviors, as well as biweekly surveys of mood and academic work load, and a final set of surveys at the end of first semester.

The project was approved by the Lifespan Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research, and participants received the gratitude of the SleepForScience team and monetary payments.

Nine papers have been published thus far from data gathered in the College Sleep Study. As others are written, they will be added to this site.

Carskadon, M.A., Sharkey, K.M., Knopik, V.S., and McGeary, J.E. Short sleep as an environmental exposure: A preliminary study associating 5-HTTLPR genotype to self-reported sleep duration and depressed mood in first-year university students. Sleep 35(6):791-796, 2012.

Roane, B.M., Seifer, R., Sharkey, K.M., Van Reen, E., Bond, T.L.Y., Raffray, T., and Carskadon, M.A. Reliability of a scale assessing depressed mood in the context of sleep. TPM Test Psychom Methodol Appl Psychol 20(1):3-11, 2013.

Van Reen, E., Sharkey, K.M., Roane, B.M., Barker, D., Seifer, R., Raffray, T., Bond, T.L., and Carskadon, M.A. Sex of college students moderates associations among bedtime, time in bed, and circadian phase angle. Journal of Biological Rhythms 28(6): 425-431, 2013.

Roane, B.M., Seifer, R., Sharkey, K.M., Van Reen, E., Bond, T.L., Raffray, T., and Carskadon, M.A. What role does sleep play in weight gain in the first semester of university? Behavioral Sleep Medicine 13(6): 491-505, 2015.

Orzech, K.M., Gradner, M.A., Roane, B.M., and Carskadon, M.A. Digital media use in the 2 h before bedtime is associated with sleep variables in university students. Computers in Human Behavior 55: 43-50, 2016.

Van Reen, E., Roane, B.M., Barker, D.H., McGeary, J.E., Borsari, B., and Carskadon, M.A. Current alcohol use is associated with sleep patterns in first-year college students. Sleep 39(6): 1321-1326, 2016.

Huang, H., Zhu, Y., Eliot, M.N., Knopik, V.S., McGeary, J.E., Carskadon, M.A., and Hart, A.C. Combining human epigenetics and sleep studies in Caenorhabditis elegans: A cross-species approach for finding conserved genes regulating sleep. Sleep 40(6), 2017.

Miller, M.B., Van Reen, E., Barker, D.H., Roane, B.M., Borsari, B., McGeary, J.E., Seifer, R., and Carskadon, M.A. The impact of sleep and psychiatric symptoms on alcohol consequences among young adults. Addictive Behaviors 66: 138-144, 2017.

Shochat, T., Barker, D.H., Sharkey, K.M., Van Reen, E., Roane, B.M., and Carskadon, M.A. An approach to understanding sleep and depressed mood in adolescents: Person-centered sleep classification. Journal of Sleep Research, 2017.