Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your research? I’m an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences as well as Director of the Chronobiology, Light, and Sleep Lab in Bethesda, Maryland. Immediately prior to arriving at USUHS, I was in San […]
Thanks for joining me today. You have such an impressive resume. Would you mind telling me about yourself and how you got into sleep medicine? While studying for my undergraduate in biology, I took a class in abnormal psychology, and one of the lectures was about dreams, which piqued my interest in psychology and sleep […]
Sleep is heavily influenced by your circadian rhythms, but it’s not the only function in your body that falls into that category. In fact, circadian rhythms govern almost every process our body carries out over the day, including metabolism, immune response, DNA repair, and physical performance. One topic that’s been getting a lot of buzz […]
Thanks so much for joining us this morning! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests? I am currently a theoretical and computational chronobiologist. I work in the area of circadian clocks. My PhD was in the field of wireless communications with a focus on designing new technology to provide […]
We’ve already looked at the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) dataset—an absolute treasure trove of sleep data, available from the NSRR at sleepdata.org—once, through the lens of sleep duration. But what about other dimensions of sleep health? After all, sleep regularity may be just as important as sleep duration in a number of contexts. We […]
In a recent interview with Dr. Amy Bender, she talks about the importance of improving the sleep of professional athletes. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you work on? I’m the Director of Clinical Sleep Science at Cerebra. We’re a sleep technology company focused on better diagnosis and treatment […]
One of the things we’re interested in as scientists is what longitudinal, large-scale data collection can tell us about sleep. Along those lines, one of our research projects involves looking at how models of circadian rhythms, as well as different sleep regularity metrics, can help us understand different outcomes for different folks. And as part […]
Algorithms are really easy to mess up. Take your pick for how: overfitting to training data, having bad training data, having too little training data, encoding human bias from your training data in the model and calling it “objective”. Feeding in new data that’s in the wrong format. Typos, subtle typos, nightmarishly subtle typos. Your […]
Thanks for letting us interview you, Dr. O’Brien. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience—where do you work, what do you do? I’m Louise O’Brien, an Associate Professor at the Division of Sleep Medicine, Department of Neurology, at the University of Michigan. My work focuses mostly on sleep disruption in pregnant women and its […]
In my last blog post, I talked about the power and potential for biophysics engines to contribute to clinical care and ragged on my own ability to play video games. The short version of it, if you don’t have time to circle back: If you’re going to make a digital twin of somebody, base it […]