Sleep scientist to speak at WSU Spokane

SPOKANE, Wash. – Internationally recognized researcher Mary Carskadon will present some of the discoveries from her investigations of adolescent sleep/wake behavior in a lecture at WSU Spokane on Friday, Dec. 2.

Every parent of a teenager knows about the morning struggle to get sleepy teens up and out the door. Are they just lazy or obstinate, or are their brains really wired differently?

The lecture, “How Development of Sleep-Wake Regulation Affects Teen Sleep,” will be held from 2-3 p.m. in the Health Sciences Building, Room 110B. It is free and open to the public. She will also speak Nov. 30 at Whitman College and Dec. 1 at the WSU Pullman campus. The Pullman talk will be at 4:15 p.m. in Wegner G1.

Carskadon is professor of psychiatry at the Brown University School of Medicine and director of chronobiology and sleep research at the E.P. Bradley Hospital, Providence, R.I. Her research focuses on the organization of sleeping and waking patterns, and she is currently seeking to understand factors that affect adolescent sleep/wake behavior.

Her research group is asking whether changes in the timing of adolescent sleep may be explained by maturational changes in the brain’s internal circadian rhythms system and the sleep homeostatic system. Her talk will explain how these biological changes interact with the adolescent life style.

This area of research may have implications for public policy affecting the starting time of school for teenagers, if schools take into consideration the physiological issues faced by sleepy adolescents in the learning environment.

Carskadon is coming to WSU at the invitation of the sleep and performance research lab at WSU Spokane headed by Dr. Gregory Belenky. She holds a doctorate in neurosciences and biobehavioral sciences specializing in sleep research from Stanford University, where she studied with Dr. William Dement, known as the “father” of sleep research and a mentor of Belenky as well. Carskadon’s work has been supported by significant grant funding from the national institutes, NASA and other sources.

WSU’s sleep and performance research lab was established in 2004 with a $4.5 million federal appropriation earmarked to support staffing, construction and equipment. A state-of-the-art sleep research laboratory space is currently under construction at the Riverpoint campus in Spokane. In addition to serving as a base for staging field studies related to sleep and performance, the lab will be one of only a handful in the world that can accommodate controlled experiments to study the effects of sleep and sleep loss on human cognitive functioning.