Graduate Student Fellow Awarded NIH Fellowship
BY GINA MANTICA
Sleep can affect a person’s mood, memory, attention, and mental health. But what happens to the brain when someone falls asleep or wakes up is not well understood. Scientists at Boston University (BU) are working to determine how the brain controls these arousal state transitions, and hope that their research can inform studies of psychiatric disorders and treatments in the future.
“In almost every neuropsychiatric disorder, altered sleep patterns occur. By studying the basic mechanisms of how transitions between sleep and wakefulness occur, we can lay the foundations to determine how this process diverges in such disorders,” says Beverly Setzer, a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at BU.
People’s behaviors and responses to their surroundings shift when they wake up from a deep sleep. For this to happen, there must be a change in their brains. Setzer, a Graduate Student Fellow at the Hariri Institute, was awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to determine what parts of the brain work together to control waking up and falling asleep.
Setzer can understand how activity in the brain changes from moment to moment using advanced data collection and analysis techniques developed by the lab of Laura Lewis, a Junior Faculty Fellow at the Hariri Institute and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering. “Beverly uses advanced brain imaging technologies to image tiny regions of the brain at fast, subsecond timescales, meaning that she is able to study brain circuits that we haven’t been able to access in the past. This is exciting because her work can now uncover how these brain regions are involved in sleep,” says Lewis. The team uses simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to conduct experiments when most other people are sleeping – starting at 9pm. EEG measures the brain’s electrical activity to help Setzer determine when someone is awake or asleep and how deep their sleep is while fMRI images inform how brain activity changes during transitions between sleep and wakefulness. When combined, Setzer can figure out what the activity in the brain looks like as people cycle through periods of deep sleep, light sleep, and wakefulness.
The amount of data that Setzer collects requires advanced processing techniques, and her NIH fellowship will enable her to pursue exciting, new analyses. “With this new funding, we can explore our research questions more deeply, and delve deeper into the data analysis. We are hoping to incorporate some more advanced data analysis techniques in the future, such as unsupervised machine learning,” says Setzer.
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