In Conversation With…Eleanor Winpenny, HFF Small Pilot Grant Recipient

Eleanor has always been curious about living beings and as a child she dreamt of being a zookeeper: “I spent a long-time hunting bugs around the garden and reading Gerald Durrell books about animals, and at one point wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a zookeeper to help protect endangered species. My interest then evolved into popular science and physics books, and even into quantum physics as a teenager!” She attended the University of Cambridge where she focused on biology and then neuroscience: “I find neuroscience fascinating, and I enjoyed studying the development and workings of the brain.” While conducting research for her PhD at the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair, she realised that lab work at the bench was perhaps not her calling. Eleanor decided to pursue another path, first joining the health policy think tank, 2020health, in London and then the not-for-profit, non-partisan policy organisation, RAND Europe, based in Cambridge which helps to improve policy and decision-making through objective research and rigorous analysis: “ My work at RAND was quite broad, across health policy, public health and health services research, so I was exposed to a wide range of areas including adolescent health. I find that the period of adolescence where teens are starting to develop their independence, individual behaviours, and their outlook on life is the most interesting.”

She then pursued this new focus on adolescent health behaviours and spent nine years conducting research at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge studying changes in diet across adolescence and the relationships with social drivers and health outcomes. In 2024, she joined Imperial College London as a Lecturer in Early Life Epidemiology, focused on research on health and health behaviors, from adolescence into young adulthood.

Eleanor is one of 11 early career researchers to have been awarded by HFF c. £25,000 to conduct research on the Impact of Digital Technology on Brain Development, Social Behaviours and Mental Health in Young People. She is currently working with adolescents to co-design methods for sleep monitoring at scale, to support future research studying the role of sleep as an important mediator of digital technology use on the brain: “We are running workshops with 16–17-year-olds looking at how we can best measure sleep in this age group. Sleep is related to so many different things, such as mental health, cardiometabolic health and diet, but it is understudied because until recently we didn’t have good ways of measuring it. However, many consumer devices have appeared on the market and people are keen to self-monitor. We are testing a variety of different devices including wrist-worn devices and mats that go under the mattress.” On the specific aims of her research she notes: “First, we want to find out what are young people’s preferences for using these tools for sleep monitoring, so we are asking them to test out the different pieces of equipment and collect data. We are then discussing how they find them and what they think would be most effective for a longer research study.”

On a more general point, the research is unpicking the complexities of the topic: “I think we’re lucky to be working with a very engaged group of adolescents. This group tells us that the use of smartphones isn’t as homogenous and detrimental as the literature and media depicts.  Some teens use the phones in a sensible way to help them with their well-being, while others still have their use restricted by their parents.” On the challenges of this HFF-funded pilot project, Eleanor notes: “It sounds trivial but the problem with asking people to wear a wrist band to collect data is that they could take it off for some reason and forget to put it back, which means you have big gaps in your data!” She notes that “there are few opportunities to do this kind of methodological preliminary work that will help us design better larger studies. You can’t answer the larger research questions unless you have robust methods, so this stage of research supported by the Foundation is crucial.”

When asked about advice for young researchers, especially for women in STEM, Eleanor is optimistic: “I would suggest that all young researchers find a suitable mentor who can guide them on their career journey. Luckily, there are many more opportunities available now for women than there used to be.”