Professor, Medicine, Epidemiology, Clinical & Translational Science Dr. Sanjay R. Patel, an expert in sleep health, is certified in pulmonary disease and sleep medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine. Dr. Patel is a professor of medicine and epidemiology at University of Pittsburgh, and medical director of UPMC Comprehensive Sleep Disorders program. He earned a master’s degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed a residency at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and a fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Patel’s research focuses on the health implications of poor sleep with particular interest on the relationships between sleep and cardiometabolic disease. He directs the Center for Sleep and Cardiovascular Outcomes Research at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published extensively on the subject of obesity management and glucose metabolism with sleep apnea, as well as the association between curtailed sleep and long-term health effects. Research and Clinical Interests: Understanding the epidemiology of sleep disorders with particular emphasis on chronic partial sleep deprivation and obstructive sleep apnea and the potential effects of these disorders on metabolism. One of the first to identify long sleep as a predictor of adverse health outcomes and is currently conducting a clinical trial evaluating the cardiovascular impact of treating sleep apnea in a diabetic population.

Prof. Nir is a sleep investigator at Tel Aviv University and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel. He pursued direct M.Sc. in Computer Science through the TAU interdisciplinary Lautman program for outstanding students, proceeded to a Ph.D. in neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute (with Rafael Malach), and then to a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, training in sleep research. In 2012, Prof. Nir set up his own lab at Tel Aviv University. To date, Prof. Nir has published 57 articles, cited over 10,000 times to date. His research has been published in prestigious journals including Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications, Neuron, and he has won several awards and prizes for his research including a recent ERC grant on sleep and memory, the Sieratzki and Adelis prizes for neuroscience, as well as HFSP, EMBO, and Fulbright fellowships. Research in the lab focuses on sleep and its relation to cognition: basic research on sleep electrophysiology and sleep functions, the neuronal basis of disconnection from the external environment during sleep and anesthesia (with a focus on the auditory system), wake-promoting neuromodulation (with a focus on the locus-coeruleus noradrenaline system), how sleep promotes learning and memory, and how sleep can be used to improve medical diagnosis in neurological and psychiatric disorders. Diverse experimental approaches are used including human research (intracranial electrophysiology in epilepsy patients, EEG, fMRI, pharmacology, eye tracking) and rodent research (single-neuron electrophysiology, optogenetics, pharmacology).