On Oct. 5, the Center for Sleep, Circadian, and Neuroscience Research hosted its inaugural AZ Sleep and Circadian Research Day. The event was held in HSIB and featured four keynote addresses from visiting faculty, 15 presentations from researchers at U of A, and the announcement of two new awards that will be bestowed yearly by the Center – an Emerging Investigator Award for a trainee researcher and an Outstanding Mentor Award. This event is intended to take place annually.
In addition to Associate Director for Behavioral and Translational Science for the Center Michael Grandner, PhD, other local speakers included psychiatry faculty Scott Killgore, PhD, and Lauren Hartstein, PhD, and psychiatry department trainees including Suzanne Gorovoy, PhD, and Kathryn Kennedy, PhD. Other local faculty speakers included Daniel Taylor, PhD, and Fabian-Xose Fernandez, PhD, from the psychology department, Rina Fox, PhD, from College of Nursing, Daniel Combs, MD, from COM-T pediatrics, and trainees Sam Larson, PhD, Daniel Matloff, PhD, and graduate students Kelly Kim, Samantha Nagy, Jacqueline Leete, and Rae Mendoza.
The first keynote was delivered by Shilpy Dixit, PhD, from the National Center for Sleep Disorders Research at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH, discussing sleep and circadian research and training priorities at NIH. The second keynote was delivered by Chief Science Officer at the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare at the U.S. Army Allison Brager, PhD, who discussed military and warfighting implications of sleep and circadian science. The third keynote was delivered by Naima Covassin, PhD, from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, discussing her work studying mechanisms linking sleep to cardiovascular disease. The final keynote was delivered by Charles Czeisler, MD, PhD, Chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, who has been one of the global key leaders in sleep and circadian research for decades. He discussed future directions for sleep and circadian research, based on his decades of field leadership experience.
The Outstanding Mentor Award was presented to Scott Killgore and the Emerging Investigator Award was presented to Kat Kennedy, who are both within the psychiatry department. The event was capped by a guided tour of the Center facilities, for those who are visiting and have not yet seen the Center in action. The event was funded by a U of A Bio5 grant.