Denise (she/her) has applied her decades of research and teaching expertise on behaviour into cracking the mystery that is baby sleep. She has a PhD in Anthropology and Biology from the University of Victoria, and turned her attention to sleep after having her own two little humans. She became fascinated (and frankly, perplexed) by how unnatural sleep can feel in those early years. Denise is driven to help make sleep less of a mystery for new parents and empower you to make informed decisions when it comes to healthy sleep practices that adhere to your unique parenting styles and family values.
Denise doesn’t preach any specific ‘method’ to sleep training, and understands that baby sleep is both a biological need AND a learned behaviour. These two driving forces need to align for your baby to transition happily and confidently into the sleep state. Rather than giving you a prescriptive A-B-C to the perfectly sleeping baby, we are all about uncovering the why. By tapping in to understanding sleep from its core, to really appreciate the internal landscape of your baby, and to let this inform the structures and rhythms that you put in place, allows you to be proactive instead of reactive to your baby’s sleep needs.
When not spilling about all things sleep, Denise can be found heading undergraduate classrooms at the University of British Columbia, dancing/running/exploring the outdoors, or hanging out with her husband, their two kids, and their pup in beautiful Squamish, BC. Denise has virtual clinical hours with us at our Oona studios, and she teaches essential sleep workshops for our parents.
