Laura Lewis

Laura Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the College of Engineering and a Junior Faculty Fellow of the Hariri Institute at Boston University.

She and her team are interested in how deep brain circuits, such as those in the thalamus, regulate and modulate cortical and behavioral states. Her fast, high-resolution neuroimaging techniques can detect activity in these complex brain circuits. She employs computational and systems neuroscience approaches to study how large-scale brain networks shift between sleep and wake states, and how sleep deprivation leads to cognitive dysfunction. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at MIT, where she studied computational and systems neuroscience of sleep and anesthesia. She then conducted postdoctoral work at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, where she used new fast imaging techniques to image subsecond brain dynamics in humans. She is the recipient of an NIH Pathway to Independence Award, has been elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, and received the Society for Neuroscience Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award, the One Mind Rising Star Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Searle Scholar Award.

Research Interests: brain imaging, neural dynamics, computational neuroscience and signal processing, neural circuits underlying sleep and attention, decoding and predicting brain activity, neurovascular coupling, psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders

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