Laura Lewis
Fast multimodal imaging of neural dynamics across sleep and wakefulness
Dr. Lewis’ scientific background demonstrates her long-standing interest in consciousness, from specializing in Cognitive Science at McGill university, to completing her PhD under Dr. Emery Brown of MIT. For context, Dr. Brown’s Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory focuses on neural signal processing algorithms and understanding general anaesthesia. Dr. Lewis then went on to continue her study of sleep, anaesthesia, and altered states of consciousness as a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. Over the years, her work has been recognized through distinctions such as the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award.
Dr. Laura Lewis is now an Assistant Professor at Boston University. Her lab develops multimodal techniques for imaging the human brain, and applies them to study the brain networks that regulate sleep, arousal, and mood. A barrier to progress in human neuroscience has been the limited spatiotemporal resolution of noninvasive methods for measuring brain activity. Their research develops computational and signal processing approaches for neuroimaging data that enable new kinds of analyses of human brain physiology and function at subsecond timescales. They use these tools to study how neural computation is dynamically modulated across sleep, wake, attentional, and affective states. They also translate these approaches to study brain network function and physiology in neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders.