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Staff profile

Overview

Professor Professor Helen L. Ball

Professor

PhD, MA, BSc (Hons)

Affiliations
Affiliation
Professor in the Department of Anthropology
Fellow of the Durham Research Methods Centre
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Biography

Helen Ball is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Durham Infancy & Sleep Centre. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1992. Her new book How Babies Sleep: a factful guide to the first 365 days and nights was published by Penguin Random House in May 2025.

Helen studies infant sleep and the parent-infant sleep relationship from a biosocial perspective. Her research examines 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.

She serves on the Lullaby Trust Scienticic Advisory Group, and the Unicef UK Baby Friendly Initiative Qualifications Board, and was recently appointed as a National Mentor (US) for the Betty Irene Moore Fellowship in Leadership and Innovation Program. She has previously served as an Associate Editor for the journal Sleep Health, and an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Human Lactation. From 2016-2025 she was Chair of the Lullaby Trust Research & Grants Committee, and from 2018-2024 was elected as a Board Member of the International Society for the Study and Prevention of Infant Deaths (ISPID).

In 2013 Helen received an award for Outstanding Impact in Society from the Economic and Social Research Council, and in 2018 Durham University received the Queen's Anniversary Prize for her research and outreach on parent-infant sleep.

Queen's Anniversary Prize

Their Royal Highnesses The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have presented the UK’s highest academic honour to Durham University for research that has helped to shape the way babies sleep and how parents care for them at night time.

At the awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace, similar to an investiture, the Royal couple awarded The Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education to the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart Corbridge, and Professor Helen Ball, Director of the Durham Infancy & Sleep Centre, with the University’s Chancellor, Sir Thomas Allen, in attendance.

The prize has been awarded to Durham University 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, are approved by The Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister from recommendations made by the Royal Anniversary Trust’s Awards Council.

Research interests

  • Infant Sleep Safety, Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI), SIDS
  • Relationship of sleeping and infant feeding methods
  • Videosomnography of parent-infant sleep
  • Integration of evolutionary and socio-cultural perspectives on anthropology of infant sleep
  • Coping with infant-related sleep disruption -- effects on parents
  • Development of sleep patterns and circadian rhythms
  • Parenting, infant care, infant feeding, infant mortality
  • Evolutionary medicine

Esteem Indicators

Publications

Supervision students

Lenka Medvecová Tinková Medvecova Tinkova

PhD Candidate

Sophie Lovell-Kennedy

PhD Student