Giulio Tononi is an award-winning psychiatrist and neuroscientist whose main focus has been the scientific understanding of consciousness. His integrated information theory is a comprehensive theory of what consciousness is, how it can be measured, and how it is realized in the brain.

Recognized for his contributions to sleep research, Carlos H. Schenck has helped identify a wide range of extreme sleep behaviors known as parasomnias and therapies to treat them, as well as their potential forensic consequences.

Focused on the functions of the hippocampus in memory and spatial cognition, Lynn Nadel’s work has led to significant contributions in the study of stress and memory, sleep and memory, memory reconsolidation, and mental retardation observed in Down syndrome.

Niels Rattenborg aims to gain insight into the function of sleep through studying birds, the only taxonomic group to independently evolve sleep patterns like those in mammals, including humans.

Matthew Wilson is Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience and Picower Scholar at MIT. His lab is interested in teasing apart the mechanisms of sleep and arousal, and applications of neuroscience in engineering and the study of intelligence.

Robert Stickgold is an associate professor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, both in biochemistry. He has published over 100 scientific publications.

Peter Staley has been a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of TAG, the Treatment Action Group. He served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) for 13 years.

Melanie Boly is a neurologist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research and at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She conducts research investigating the neural correlates of decreased consciousness during vegetative state, anesthesia, and sleep using functional neuroimaging techniques.

Chiye Aoki majored in biology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She entered the world of neuroscience during those years by participating in research that monitored brain activities of animals undergoing the natural transition from wakefulness to REM sleep to answer the question: Why do we need to sleep?

Professor Mary Carskadon is an authority on adolescent sleep. Her research raised public awareness about the consequences of insufficient sleep in adolescents and influenced education policy, prompting school districts to delay school start times for teens.

Paul Shaw received his Ph.D. working with Allan Rechtschaffen at the University of Chicago investigating the effects of chronic total sleep deprivation in the rat. He subsequently joined the Neurosciences Institute as a postdoctoral fellow with Giulio Tononi where they began using the fruit fly as a model system to identify molecules that play critical roles in regulating sleep homeostasis.

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science, nature, and human biology for almost three decades. Her new book, The Genius of Birds (Penguin Press, 2016)–a New York Times bestseller–has been called a “lovely, celebratory survey” by The New York Times and “gloriously provocative and highly entertaining” by the Wall Street Journal.

Sridevi Sarma received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University; and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is now an assistant professor in the Institute for Computational Medicine, Department of Biomedical Engineering, at Johns Hopkins University.

Ken Paller is the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program at Northwestern University. His work focuses on sleep, memory, and consciousness, and the recent groundbreaking research he conducted with colleagues …

Antonio Zadra is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Montreal and an investigator at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. Tony’s work explores lucid …

Deirdre Barrett is a Lecturer and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. She has written five books including Pandemic Dreams and The Committee of Sleep and is the editor of …