The How and Why of Sleep
- Speaker
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Yang Dan, Ph.D.University of California, Berkeley
Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite those interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.
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Sleep is a fundamental biological process, and its disruption profoundly impacts human health. In this lecture, Yang Dan will describe her team’s effort to identify neurons involved in sleep generation using a combination of optogenetics, electrophysiology, imaging and gene expression profiling. They found that sleep is controlled by a highly distributed network spanning the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. They also discovered that sleep neurons are part of the central somatic and autonomic motor circuits. To address the question of “why” we sleep, they are now exploring how sleep interacts with the cardiovascular, immune and neuroendocrine systems.
About the Speaker
Dan is the Nan Fung Life Sciences Chancellor’s Chair in Neuroscience in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. She studied physics as an undergraduate at Peking University and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She did her postdoctoral research on vision at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School. Her recent interest is understanding how and why we sleep and the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive control.