The Causes and Consequences of Sleep in the Human Brain
- Speaker
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Laura Lewis, Ph.D.Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor of IMES and EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Associate Faculty, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital
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Sleep transforms nearly every aspect of brain function and is essential for brain health. In this Presidential Lecture, Laura Lewis will discuss how new noninvasive imaging technologies are revealing how sleep arises in the human brain. She will outline key control systems that regulate sleep and behavior. Lewis will also discuss how sleep causes waves of fluid flow in the brain and the relationship between sleep and brain waste clearance, which may be critical for how sleep actively maintains brain health in aging. This work will highlight how sleep profoundly affects the human brain’s high-level cognition and basic housekeeping processes.
About the Speaker
Lewis is the Athinoula A. Martinos associate professor in IMES and EECS at MIT and associate faculty at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. She received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from MIT and completed postdoctoral research in biomedical imaging technologies at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her research develops techniques for imaging the human brain and applies them to study how sleep modulates human brain function.