The maturation of sleep patterns in teens has been a focus of my research for 25 years – long enough for the teens I first studied to have teenagers of their own. I often wonder why we don't know it all yet, and then I step into the world and am reminded of the complexity of life and the accelerating rate of change in opportunities, expectations, technology, and social mores. Developing humans are at the center of it all, with sleep's core behavioral role at the mercy of these factors and many more.

I am humbled by the task of attempting to understand the phenomena we observe, and I am inspired by the process of scientific investigation. As in other fields, progress is usually neither linear nor direct; it is affected by the evolution of methodologies and ideas, and the flow of knowledge can be entirely redirected by conceptual break-throughs. My research in the area of adolescent sleep patterns has benefited from several such major reconstructive conceptual shifts. The first seism occurred in the longitudinal Summer Sleep Camp study at Stanford – inspired by William Dement and Thomas Anders – in which we not only failed to confirm the predicted reduction of sleep need across adolescent development but also showed a restructuring of sleep so that pubertal adolescents sleeping no less than before were actually sleepier in the afternoon. The conclusion: teens don't need less sleep.