Laura Lewis is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University. She develops multimodal approaches for imaging the human brain and applies them to study the neural basis of sleep, aiming to understand how sleep contributes to cognition and brain health across the life span. Her work has identified neural mechanisms that regulate local and global sleep states, used new fast imaging techniques to image subsecond brain dynamics in humans, and discovered waves of cerebrospinal fluid flow in the sleeping human brain. She completed her Ph.D. in neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted her postdoctoral work at Harvard University and the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has been elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows and named a Kavli fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and she has received the Society for Neuroscience Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award, the One Mind Rising Star Award, a NARSAD Young Investigator grant, and a Searle Scholars award.
Project:
Glial mechanisms by which sleep preserves cognitive function and plasticity in aging