Qantas Hired This Professor to Help Flyers Beat Jet Lag
Photo Credit: Steve Simpson is director of the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney. Researchers there are working with Qantas on jet lag remedies. Qantas / Brent Winstone
Skift Take
Travelers can leverage effective strategies to limit jet lag. There's only one problem. Most people lack the willpower to follow advice from the scientific community. That hasn't stopped Qantas, which hired a specialist to help.
Most flyers have felt it in one form or another: the incredible drag of jet lag on their bodies and minds.
Steve Simpson is here to help.
Simpson is director of the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, where roughly 1,500 researchers, including philosophers, historians, economists, policy engineers and mathematicians study how to control modern lifestyle diseases, like obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Those topics remain his focus, but recently Qantas, Australia's national airline, asked for his help. In March, it started its first nonstop route to Europe — 17 hours from Perth to London — and it wanted Simpson to design an inflight experience to combat jet lag. Qantas had earlier worked with a professor at the university to develop a new flight planing system that it would allow it to efficently launch some of the world's longest routes, such as Dallas to Sydney and Perth to London.
Simpson, a frequent flyer and time-zoner crosser, told Qa
