Philippa Gander, "Life in Sync: The Science of Internal Clocks and How We’re Disrupting Them" (Princeton UP, 2025)

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**Gregory McNiff** (1:31)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gregory McNiff, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Philippa Gander, the author of Life in Sync, The Science of Internal Clocks and How We're Disrupting Them. The book was published by Princeton University Press in October of 2025 Philippa Gander is Professor Emerita at Massey University and an internationally recognized scholar of sleep and circadian rhythms. After earning her PhD at the University of Auckland and conducting research at Harvard University Medical School and NASA Ames Research Center, she became the inaugural director of the Sleep, Wake Research Center at Massey University. In 2009, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2017, she was appointed an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the study of sleep and fatigue. I selected Life in Sync because over the past several decades, as Philippa demonstrates, research has fundamentally changed our understanding of biological time and the role our internal clocks play in regulating nearly every aspect of our health, behavior, and performance. Life in Sync offers an accessible introduction to the science of biobiology, and we'll talk about that shortly, while examining how modern society increasingly conflicts and to some extent is challenging the biological rhythms that has shaped our lives for millions of years.
Philippa, thank you so much for joining me to discuss your book.

**Philippa Gander** (3:01)
Thank you, Greg, for inviting me to be here. Much appreciated.

**Gregory McNiff** (3:05)
Likewise. Philippa, I asked all my guests this first question, why did you write Life in Sync and who is the target audience for the book?

**Philippa Gander** (3:13)
Well, this book has been brewing in my head for a very long time. Because particularly in the second half of my career, I got very involved in working with people from all sorts of different walks of life, working with industry, trying to make the science useful to people in the real world. The more I did that, the more I realized that actually a lot of what we've been learning over the time of my career is actually valuable to people in their daily lives, but we had not been communicating it in a way that people could use.
The same was true in talking to my family and friends about these things. Because immediately people start to see the relevance, but we haven't explained it in any systematic way. So it was one of those things that was on my to-do list, and I actually had to wait until the COVID lockdown, which was quite long in New Zealand, where I had nothing else that I had to do or couldn't do. So I started putting together my thoughts then. But it's also one of those things reflecting on it, that's a bit of an irony in modern science, where you're supposed to be getting more and more reduction as you get down to more and more little detail and that helps you understand the picture. It doesn't necessarily. Having the time to step back and think more about the context of all of the things that we've been studying, I think that was another reason for writing the book.