Sleep is a fundamental brain state required for a range of processes, facilitating everything from cellular regeneration and immune function to emotional regulation and memory processing. Disrupted sleep therefore has substantial effects on our health and is associated with many, if not all, mental health disorders.

One of the key functions of sleep is to provide optimal conditions for consolidating memory, strengthening and incorporating salient experiences with existing memories for long-term storage, whilst weakening unnecessary information. This function may be especially crucial for processing emotional memories, including traumatic experiences. My research focuses on understanding how sleep facilitates the processing of traumatic experiences using a range of techniques including electrophysiology, brain stimulation, and machine learning. By exploring how sleep modulates emotional memory processing, we aim to uncover novel therapeutic applications that harness sleep to improve resilience and reduce the risk of trauma-related disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Biography

In 2013, I began my DPhil education at the University of Oxford where I studied sleep and circadian rhythms in individuals at high risk for developing psychosis, supervised by Drs Katharina Wulff, Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, and Kate Porcheret. In 2017, I joined the group of Professor Matt Jones at the University of Bristol where I used in-vivo electrophysiological techniques to study cell assemblies, groups of neurons that temporally and functionally organize to encode and store information. I am now an MRC CDA Research Fellow at the University of Bristol with my lab focused on the role of sleep for processing emotional memories.