My mom is a data analyst for the Computational Sleep Laboratory at the Veterans Affairs Research Foundation. She is also a senior research scientist in neurology at Oregon Health and Science University. Most of her research is about the relationship between sleep and neurological conditions such as traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Her lab is putting together a manuscript about circadian rhythms and light exposure. Their subjects live in a place with big windows, so we needed to think about natural light exposure and aviation metar reports include cloud cover observations at 5 min resolution. I was able to help my mom interpret the metars from KPDX and then she wrote code to visualize them. Here’s the Bozeman airport (KBZN) for fun.
Her goal is to quantify the amount of light exposure people received. Circadian rhythms are strongly affected by the amount and type of light people are exposed to, so to understand how the brain controls circadian rhythms we need to know what light conditions they experienced.
Thank you for looking at my topic, I hope you leaned something new in doing so and have a good day/night!