Current Research and Scholarly Interests
From a research perspective, my long-term career plan is to refine the understanding of normal and dysfunctional sleep, much like the Epilepsy Phenome/Genome Project (EPGP) and Epi4K are doing for the enigmatic epilepsies. Insufficient sleep has been deemed a public health problem with poorly understood behavioral and physiologic sleep disorders lying at the core of the issue. I am currently using well-defined distinct and objective phenotypes (e.g. periodic limb movements, hypocretin-deficient narcolepsy) to acquire the analytic skills necessary to expand my knowledge of both signal processing and genetics, with the former enhancing my ability to identify and/or refine sleep phenotypes, and the latter facilitating the pathophysiological understanding of these phenotypes. As a consequence of a better link between symptoms/phenotypes, physiology, and genetic risks, more personally targeted and effective therapeutics can be developed to address the enriched spectrum of sleep disorders.
