FHS Vanier Scholar researches effects of stress and sleep patterns on female reproductive development

By: Geron Malbas

PhD student Amanda Rowlands is one of two SFU recipients of the 2020 NSERC Vanier Scholarship. After being nominated by SFU through a university-wide competition, she was then selected to go on to the Ottawa-national level competition. 

“I was initially shocked when notified that I was one of the recipients of an NSERC Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. This is an extremely competitive award, so I am incredibly honoured and excited to have been awarded this prestigious scholarship,” she explains. 

She was originally drawn to the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) in 2013 after travelling and observing the health disparities in low and middle-income countries. She saw how FHS offered the opportunity to further understand and study different health aspects, and allowed her to gain a multi-faceted approach to understanding health and disease.

Rowlands completed her Bachelor of Sciences in the Population and Quantitative Health Sciences stream. She began an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship funded master’s thesis with Pablo Nepomnaschy in 2018, but quickly transitioned to the PhD program to facilitate a more complex investigation of her proposed project. She has since been working on her PhD research with Nepomnaschy in the Maternal and Child Health Lab. 

“The sense of community, especially within FHS and my research lab, has been such a positive experience, and the support I’ve received in both my undergraduate and graduate degrees has been tremendous,” she says. “Being a student and young researcher in this faculty, and specifically in the Maternal and Child Health Lab, has exposed me to diverse perspectives of approaching research and scientific inquiry.”

The Vanier Scholarship enables her to focus on her research project examining how stress and sleep patterns may have an effect on reproductive development in adolescent girls, and reproductive ageing in women. 

“Adolescence and reproductive ageing are both critical time periods during women’s reproductive lifespans, and sleep is an important factor involved in supporting healthy development and ageing,” she explains. “Having conducted a preliminary analysis, our findings suggest that girls who have not yet reached reproductive maturation have higher stress levels and poorer sleep quality compared to girls at the end of their transition to reproductive maturity. Women entering reproductive ageing may have similar outcomes with respect to stress and sleep.”

Rowlands’ next steps in her research are to better understand the relationships between sleep, stress, and reproductive health outcomes. Depending on the COVID-19 pandemic, her team hopes to do a field season with a community in Guatemala in 2021. Upon completion of her PhD, she plans to continue research in the field of maternal and child health and development.

“It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that to support healthy child growth and development, it is critical that we understand, support, and advocate for improving women’s health across the lifespan,” she emphasizes.