THE Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall will present the UK’s highest academic honour to Durham University today 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 will award 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 Parent-Infant Sleep Lab. The university’s Chancellor, Sir Thomas Allen, will also attend.

The Lab’s work with more than 5,000 parents and babies during the last 20 years has increased parents’ understanding of babies’ sleep, how best to care for babies during the night, and how best to keep them safe when asleep.

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.

Five PhD students who have worked on Sleep Lab research projects have also been invited to the palace for the ceremony, at which Prince Charles will present a medal to Professor Corbridge before the Duchess presents a scroll, representing the certificate, to Professor Ball.

Professor Ball, of the Department of Anthropology at Durham University, said: “To receive recognition for this work via the Queen’s Anniversary Prize is tremendously rewarding, and we are most grateful to all the organisations and individuals who have shared our work and translated it into policy and practice.”

Working together with partner organisations, the research of the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab in the Department of Anthropology has helped to reduce rates of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) through evidence-based advice for health professionals and parents.

As a result of the Lab’s research, the use of side-car cribs on postnatal wards has spread from the UK to Europe, USA and Australia. Side-car cribs are cots that can be attached to the mother’s bed without a barrier between the two, keeping mothers and babies close in the early postnatal period.

The Lab’s online Infant Sleep Information Source, run by Professor Helen Ball and Dr Charlotte Russell, which has been accessed more than two million times across the world, is shared and recommended by parents and health professionals as a reliable evidence-based home of information on normal infant sleep.

A related app, called Infant Sleep Info, is also used by parents with new-born babies.

The Royal Anniversary Trust announced the Prize Winners at St James’s Palace in November last year. At the time, the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart Corbridge, said: “We are hugely honoured to receive this prestigious award, which recognises the immensely valuable and wide-reaching impact of the research carried out by the team in the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab.

“At Durham, we aim to deliver research that is world-leading and world-changing and the work of the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab is a perfect example of this commitment."