Helen Ball is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Durham Infancy & Sleep Centre. Helen studies infant sleep and the parent-infant sleep relationship from a biosocial perspective. Broadly defined, her research examines the sleep ecology of infants, young children and their parents. This encompasses attitudes and practices regarding infant sleep, behavioural and physiological monitoring of infants and their parents during sleep, infant sleep development, and the discordance between cultural sleep preferences and biological sleep needs.
Helen has conducted research in hospitals and the community, and contributes to national and international policy and practice guidelines on infant care. She pioneers the translation of academic research on infant sleep into evidence for use by parents and healthcare staff via BASIS – the Baby Sleep Information Source website (www.basisonline.org.uk). She serves as Associate Editor of the journal Sleep Health, and was on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Human Lactation for over a decade. She is Chair of the Lullaby Trust Grants Committee, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board. From 2018-2022 she served as an elected Board Member of the International Society for the Study and Prevention of Infant Deaths (ISPID), and she currently serves on the Qualifications Board for Unicef UK Baby Friendly Initiative.
In 2013 Helen received an award for Outstanding Impact in Society from the Economic and Social Research Council, and in 2018 Durham University was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for her research and outreach on parent-infant sleep. This prize was awarded for ‘leading influential research on parent-infant sleep with a widely-used public information service’. The awards, part of the national honours system in the UK, were approved by The Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister from recommendations made by the Royal Anniversary Trust’s Awards Council.
Her first trade book How Babies Sleep will be published by Cornerstone Press in 2025.