Born in Essex, England, Dr Michaela Pawley is a third culture kid who spent most of her childhood growing up in China and Sri Lanka. This early exposure to diverse lifestyles, norms, methods of communication, and perceptions sparked her curiosity in understanding human behaviour. Michaela completed her BSc in Psychology at the University of Groningen (2021), where she developed a keen interest in clinical and positive psychology. Motivated by this, she founded Not Alone, a student-run community support platform that provided evidence-based training to volunteers to deliver one-on-one and group support sessions to peers.
Michaela obtained an MRes in Clinical Psychology at the University of Birmingham in 2022. Her master’s thesis focused on adolescent emotion regulation and the development of a digital game-based intervention. Alongside her studies, Michaela worked as a Young Person Practitioner for Action for Children, delivering CBT- and ACT-informed early interventions to young people and their families. In this role, she saw firsthand how often sleep problems appeared alongside other mental health challenges, yet how rarely they were directly addressed.
This observation shaped the direction of her doctoral research. Michaela secured a Psychology Departmental PhD Fellowship at the University of Warwick, where she examined the longitudinal role of sleep in adolescent self-harm and suicide behaviours, which she completed in 2026. It was during this time that she developed a strong interest in using longitudinal cohort studies to better understand the mechanisms and contributing factors underlying youth mental health. This has become one of her main scientific methods as she now primarily conducts secondary data analyses using longitudinal cohort data in her research.
During her PhD, Michaela joined the Institute for Mental Health as a Research Associate and after completing her doctorate she secured a Research Fellow position. She has been investigating the role of sleep in depression across several demographic groups, including adolescents, young adults, and clinical populations. She has also been examining whether sleep problems predict the later onset of self-harm and suicide risk. In addition, Michaela is contributing to the development of a novel, co-designed behavioural sleep intervention for individuals with treatment-resistant depression, alongside people with lived experience, healthcare practitioners, and other academics.