Current Sleep Medicine Reports - Meet The Editors
Ruth M. Benca
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Ruth Benca is Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Wake Forest School of Medicine. Previously, she was Chair, Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine and Director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Sleep Medicine and Research. She received her AB at Harvard and her MD and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago and is board certified in Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine. Her research focuses on the interface between sleep and psychiatric disorders across the lifespan, and the role of sleep and sleep disorders on Alzheimer’s disease. She has served as President of the Sleep Research Society and on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, is Editor-in-chief of Current Sleep Medicine Reports and Insomnia Section Editor of UpToDate, and a member of the Sleep Medicine Advisory Committee for the American Board of Internal Medicine.
David Plante
Section Editor: Hypersomnia Disorders
David Plante, MD, PhD is a clinician-scientist with specific expertise in central nervous system disorders of hypersomnolence as well as the interface of sleep and neuropsychiatric disorders. He is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as the Medical Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness/Wisconsin Sleep and as the Program Director of the clinical sleep medicine fellowship.
Catherine McCall
Section Editor: Insomnia
Dr. Catherine McCall is a double-board certified sleep psychiatrist in the Department of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at VA Puget Sound Health Care Center. She is the Director of the VA Puget Sound Sleep Clinic, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and a core faculty member for the UW sleep medicine fellowship. Her clinical and research interests include the intersection of sleep medicine and psychiatry, insomnia, nightmares, circadian rhythm disorders, and the effects of psychiatric medications on sleep. Dr. McCall currently serves on multiple national and international committees, including the AASM task force to update the clinical practice guidelines for management of extrinsic circadian rhythm disorders, the ABIM Sleep Medicine CERT/MOC Assessment Approval Committee, and the Executive Committee of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.
Lisa Fucito
Section Editor: Sleep, Addiction and Substance Use
Dr. Lisa Fucito is an Associate Professor and Licensed Clinical Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and Director of the Tobacco Treatment Service at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She is also a Board Member of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, a global professional society dedicated to the generation and dissemination of knowledge related to tobacco and nicotine. Her research seeks to understand the bio-behavioral underpinnings of substance use and to develop more effective interventions. To these aims, she utilizes various research designs and methods including daily experience sampling/biosensors, qualitative studies, laboratory-analogue models, clinical trials, and implementation science frameworks. She is interested in how technology can increase the reach and effectiveness of interventions and improve diagnostic precision. Of particular relevance to her Editorial role, Dr. Fucito is an expert in sleep-substance use associations. She has developed and tested integrated sleep and substance use interventions for cigarette smoking and heavy alcohol use.
Kelly DeMartini
Section Editor: Sleep, Addiction and Substance Use
Dr. Kelly DeMartini is a Research Scientist and Licensed Clinical Health Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. She is an expert in the development and evaluation of alcohol interventions. Her program of research focuses on the application of state-of-the-art statistical modeling to identify predictors and sequelae of heavy drinking, the development and validation of psychological assessments, and the development of technology-based alcohol interventions. Her current interests center on the utilization of mobile technology (e.g., smartphones and wearables) to understand the development of AUDs and how technology can increase the utilization of treatments that can be accessed outside of a traditional in-person treatment setting. Other current work focuses on the development of interventions that concurrently target multiple health behaviors, namely alcohol use and sleep problems. Her clinical work has focused on the treatment of alcoholic liver disease in liver transplant and end-stage liver disease patients. She current serves as a Board Member of a Working Group for the Alcoholic Hepatitis Network project (AlcHepNet), a clinical and translational research initiative funded by NIAAA. The goal of this Working Group is to develop guidelines for clinical trials in patients with co-occurring alcoholic hepatitis and alcoholic liver disease.
Rami Khayat
Section Editor: Sleep and Cardiovascular Disease
Dr. Rami Khayat is an expert in the cardiovascular consequences and interaction of sleep disordered breathing. He is the director of the University of California-Irvine Comprehensive Sleep Center. He has published extensively in the fields of sleep apnea and heart failure and inpatient sleep testing and management.
Jeanne Duffy
Section Editor: Sleep and Circadian Rhythms
Jeanne F. Duffy, MBA, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Lead Investigator in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She received her MBA from Simmons University and her PhD (in physiology and neurobiology) from Northeastern University.
Dr. Duffy is a reviewer for numerous scientific journals and funding agencies within the United States and abroad and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Rhythms, Sleep Medicine Research, and Clocks & Sleep. She is a member of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, the Sleep Research Society, and World Sleep. She is a clinical researcher who has published widely in the fields of sleep and chronobiology, and her research focuses on understanding how the circadian timing system impacts sleep and subsequent waking performance; and what factors contribute to individual differences in sleep timing, duration, need, quality, and response to sleep loss.
Rebecca Robillard
Section Editor: Sleep and COVID-19
After completing her PhD in clinical neuropsychology at the University of Montreal, Dr. Robillard is now Associate Professor at the School of Psychology of the University of Ottawa, directs the clinical axis of the Sleep Research Unit at the Institute of Mental Health Research at the Royal, and co-chairs the Canadian Sleep Research Consortium. Her research group investigates the interactions between mental health, the sleeping brain and the sleeping heart, with particular attention to mood disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Their work also seeks to optimize sleep and chronobiological interventions for people with mental disorders.
Ricardo Osorio
Section Editor: Sleep and Dementia
As a neuroscientist, my research focus is on studying how changes in sleep patterns as people age relate to normal brain function as well as the effects of sleep on complex brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and late-life depression. I have a broad range of clinical research experience, including neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, home sleep monitoring, neuroimaging, and biofluid biomarkers of AD. I completed my psychiatry residency training in Madrid, Spain, in 2006 and then worked as a geriatric psychiatrist until 2009. After that, I joined the NYU Grossman School of Medicine as a research scientist and became Associate Professor of Psychiatry a few years later. Currently, I am leading two longitudinal studies that investigate how sleep disturbances, cognition, affective symptoms, and markers of neurodegeneration are connected. I am also leading a project that uses a radiotracer called (S,S)-[(11)C]O-methyl reboxetine to explore the relationship between locus coeruleus function, sleep, and AD pathology. In addition to this, I am also interested in understanding the role of orexin and norepinephrine in sleep-dependent memory processing and hyperarousal states. Moreover, I am investigating the relationship between obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
Leila Tarokh
Section Editor: Sleep and Development
Leila Tarokh, PhD, is a Group Leader and Senior Scientist at the Translation Research Center of the University Hospital of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and the University Hospital of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Bern, Switzerland. Her work examines the role of sleep neurophysiology in psychiatric disorders with a focus on examining the utility of the sleep EEG as a biomarker in psychiatric disorders with an adolescent onset.
Shaun Purcell
Section Editor: Sleep and Genetics
My first degrees were in Experimental Psychology, from the University of Oxford and University of London; my PhD was from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. After completing a Fellowship at the Whitehead Institute, I joined the Psychiatric & Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. At MGH, my primary focus was in neuropsychiatric genetics, working with colleagues at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. My main projects centered around developing statistical and computational tools for the design of genetic studies, the detection of gene variants influencing complex human traits and the dissection of these effects in the larger context of other genetic and environmental factors. Together with many colleagues, I participated in several landmark genome-wide association and exome-sequencing studies of neuropsychiatric disease, in particular bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. I am currently based in the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. My current focus is to better understand the links between sleep, behavior, cognition and psychiatric disease, using human genetic and computational approaches, with the aim of providing opportunities for precision medicine and targeted interventions in neuropsychiatric disease.
Omonigho Bubu
Section Editor: Sleep and Health Disparities
Dr. Bubu is an Assistant Professor and physician scientist at NYU Grossman School of Medicine (NYUSoM), in the Departments of Psychiatry and Population Health, with a programmatic research focus on sleep, aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Dr. Bubu has graduate, internship, and fellowship-level clinical and research training in neurology, neuro-epidemiology and public health. His research examines how age-related and age-dependent sleep changes, and vascular risk, impact cognitive decline and AD risk, and how they drive AD related disparities.
He has received various grants to fund his research, such as the Alzheimer’s Association Research Grant – to promote Diversity (AARG-D), American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) Bridge Award for Early Career Investigators, NYU Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Developmental Grant, and Columbia Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Alzheimer’s Disease Disparities (CIRAD) Pilot Grant, as well as the BrightFocus Alzheimer’s grant. Dr. Bubu also has NIH/NIA funding that is utilizing a health disparities research framework related to aging to investigate within and between racial/ethnic effects of disturbed sleep, and vascular risk on AD pathology. At NYUSoM, Dr. Bubu has continued to establish his emerging national presence as a sleep and AD investigator, and has been involved in various research projects that have established that sleep is associated with cognitive decline and AD. He has collaborated with experts in the field on intramural, foundation and NIH grants, with significant contributions that have improved our understanding of the relationship between sleep, particularly, obstructive sleep apnea and AD.
Ina Djonlagic
Section Editor: Sleep and Learning and Memory
Dr. Djonlagic, MD, FAASM, is an Assistant Professor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School, board certified in Neurology and Sleep Medicine. Born in Germany, she completed Medical School and first residency training in Germany, before completing a neurology residency at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and a research and clinical sleep medicine fellowship through the Division of Sleep Medicine and Harvard Medical School. Her clinical exposure to patients with sleep disorders and cognitive problems has driven her research interest of better understanding the plastic brain processes during sleep which result in the formation of new memories and how those processes are affected by diseases and genes.
Her research has been supported by the NIH and American Sleep Medicine Foundation grants and has focused on the effects of sleep disturbances on macro and micro-EEG-features as well as cognitive outcomes and changes in brain morphology. She also successfully conducted a randomized controlled trial examining the effect of CPAP therapy on sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Dr. Djonlagic is currently a Co-investigator for a study examining the evolution of sleep disturbances in relation to the accumulation of amyloid and tau pathology and as a possible driver of neural network dysfunction in participants of the Harvard Aging Brain Study and in a newly-recruited Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) cohort.
Aside from conducting research, Dr. Djonlagic sees clinical patients with neurological and sleep disorders at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and teaches sleep medicine fellows, residents and HMS students.
Tony Cunningham
Section Editor: Sleep and Learning and Memory
Tony is the Director for the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. Tony received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, completed his clinical internship at the VA Eastern Kansas Healthcare System, and recently received his license to practice psychology in the state of Massachusetts. Tony's primary research focus is understanding the role of sleep and sleep loss in emotion and memory processing, and how knowledge of these systems can be applied to both healthy and clinical populations. In choosing to pursue clinical training within cognitive neuroscience labs, Tony's background has prepared him to carve a niche at the intersection between neuroscience and clinical practice. His long-term research goal is to understand changes in underlying brain networks responsible for emotional processing following sleep loss, and translate this knowledge into the development of novel and effective therapeutic interventions. Tony recently received a K23 from NIMH and a career development award from the Sleep Research Society Foundation to help jumpstart his independent research program at the Center for Sleep and Cognition.
Alon Avidan
Section Editor: Sleep and Neurological Conditions
Dr. Avidan is Professor of Neurology at UCLA where he serves as Director of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center. He completed his Neurology Residency at the Georgetown University Medical Center, and Fellowship in Sleep Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. He was recently awarded and served as Visiting Professor of Neurology Education in the Department of Neurology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, and was selected to receive the 2014 American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) Excellence in Education Award, for career contributions to education in sleep medicine.
His research interests are in the area of sleep medicine, specifically investigating how sleep disorders such as REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD) may help predict future development of neurodegenerative conditions. Clinically, he is interested in investigating the impact of sleep on manifestation and progression of neurological diseases. He has published over 100 manuscripts on sleep disorders and co-authored four books: “Handbook of Sleep Medicine,” “Geriatric Sleep Medicine,” “Review of Sleep Medicine” and "Atlas of Clinical Sleep Medicine.” He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a Diplomate in the Specialty of Sleep Medicine by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Don Tucker
Section Editor: Sleep and Neuromodulation
Don M. Tucker is CEO and Senior Scientist of The Brain Electrophysiology Laboratory Company and a new startup for electric sleep therapy, Neurosom. He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. His former company, Electrical Geodesics, Inc., was sold to Philips in 2017. He has published Mind From Body (2007), Cognition and Neural Development with Phan Luu (2012), and Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing with Mark Johnson (2021).
Michael Smith
Section Editor: Sleep and Pain
Dr. Smith is a Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Nursing at Johns Hopkins University. He directs the Behavioral Medicine Division in the Department of Psychiatry and Co-Directs the Biobehavioral Pain Research Training Program, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Dr. Smith is a Clinical Psychologist, Board Certified in Behavioral Sleep Medicine. He serves on several editorial boards and governmental advisory panels. He is a co-founder and Past President of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine. Dr. Smith’s 21 year history of continuously NIH funded research focuses on the neurobehavioral causes, consequences, and treatments of insomnia and sleep loss with an emphasis on the interface between sleep and pain.
Laura Palagini
Section Editor: Sleep and Psychiatric Disorders
Laura Palagini MD, PhD is a psychiatrist and sleep medicine expert at the Psychiatric Clinic, University Hospital of Pisa, Azienda Ospedaliero Universitaria Pisana AUOP coordinator of the “Insomnia Clinic.” In 1998-2000, she was a Research Assistant, Department of Psychiatry, Sleep Laboratory, University of Davis, California, USA. In 2004, she concluded her PhD at the University of Pisa, Italy. Prof. Palagini received a Degree in Cognitive Behavioral therapy for insomnia, Philadelphia (USA); Sleep Medicine expert, Cambridge (UK); Expert in Sleep Medicine–Italian Association of Sleep Medicine.
She served of a Member of the board of The Italian Association of Sleep Medicine (AIMS) 2015-2022, Member of the Board of the Sleep Research Society (SRS) (TEAC committee) 2014-2017, and she serves as Member of the committee for the “World Sleep Day” World Sleep Association (WSA) and Member of the European Insomnia Network (European Sleep Research Society). She is a member of the task force “Sleep and Women” of the European insomnia network, Member of the European CBT-I Academy, European Sleep Research Society.
Prof. Palagini is a recipient of several awards in the sleep field. She was in the scientific committee of more than 100 courses and meetings about sleep disturbances and mental health, and was an invited speaker at more than 150 national and international meetings. She is an author of more than 100 scientific contributions and more than 10 chapters and book contribution in the field of sleep, mental health and women's mental health.
Her research interests cover the following areas: 1) insomnia and circadian rhythms disorders consequences on mental health 2) insomnia and circadian rhythms disorders in women across the lifespan 3) sleep disturbances and consequences on pregnancy.
Christopher Kaufmann
Section Editor: Sleep and Public Health
Dr. Chris Kaufmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He is a public health researcher with interests at the intersection of aging, sleep, and health services research. His research focuses on using epidemiologic and administrative claims data to identify patterns in use of health services for sleep disorders among older adults and examine how such patterns affect trajectories of aging (e.g., cognitive decline and neurodegeneration) across the life course.
Indira Gurubhagavatula
Sleep Safety in Critical Occupations
Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula is Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also Director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship and Director of the Sleep Clinic at the Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia. Her research has focused on sleep apnea screening and treatment in safety-sensitive occupational groups including commercial truck drivers and law enforcement officers. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. She has served as a consultant for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to help develop guidance for screening and treatment of sleep apnea in commercial truck drivers.
Henri Korkalainen
Section Editor: Sleep and Technology
Henri Korkalainen received his PhD degree in medical physics from the University of Eastern Finland in 2020 and the Title of Docent/Adjunct Professor in 2022. He joined the Sleep Technology and Analytics Research Group in 2018 and he is currently working with the Department of Technical Physics, University of Eastern Finland, and the Diagnostic Imaging Center, Kuopio University Hospital. His research interests include the development of deep learning methods in medical diagnostics, mainly in the field of sleep medicine, and the simplification of current diagnostic recordings with the development of artificial intelligence applied to easily applicable and wearable sensors.