This is a non-exhaustive list ongoing projects (primarily
computational tool/methods development) and collaborations
(applying these tools to existing or new data collections led by
others):
Data, tools and methods
National Sleep Research
Resource: working with founding-member Dr. Susan Redline,
Dr. Purcell co-directs the NSRR,
an NLBI-funded respository of data for sleep science
[ link ]
Luna: we are devloping a
growing library of tools designed to work with large numbers of
sleep studies, with a current focus on the sleep EEG
[ link ]
Personalized sleep staging:
Dr. Purcell is PI of an NHLBI-funded R01 to support the development
of methods to better capture between-individual variability in
automated sleep staging, and to define new quantitative metrics,
beyond traditional classification of sleep stages, to better capture
individual differences in sleep
Dynamics: Dr. Purcell is PI
of an NHLBI-funded R21 to develop methods to better
capture ultradian dynamics in sleep signals (patterns of
change within a single night)
Sleep epidemiology and health
Sleep, race and health disparities: working with
collaborators at Harvard School of Public
Health, Dr. Purcell is PI of a NIMHD-funded R21 to better measure
which aspects of sleep might contribute to racial/ethnic disparities in
health outcomes
Normative studies for sleep
biomarkers: if objective sleep metrics are ever to be used as
clinically useful biomarkers, it will be important to first
characterize baseline sources of variability in these measures, to
find unbiased and reliable measures. This involves studying sleep
biomarkers in large and diverse datasets, following our work
on sleep
spindles, for example.
Sleep neurophysiology, psychiatric disease and genetics
GRINS: the Global
Research Initiative on the Neurophysiology of Schizophrenia is a
collaboration with investigators at the Stanley Center, Broad
Institute and Wuxi Mental Health Center (China), as well as other
investigators at Mass General and McLean Hospitals. This project
focuses on collecting high density sleep EEG and other measures in
patients with schizophrenia and matched controls.
Animal models: in
collaboration with Dr. Jen Pan at the Stanley Cener for Psychiatric
Research, Broad Institute, and others, we are studying the effects of
human mutations associated with psychiatric disease, in vivo
in the sleep EEG.
Sleep EEG GWAS: leveraging
genetically informative datasets in
the NSRR, we aim to perform
genome-wide association studies to link objective measures of sleep
macro and micro architecture with genetic risk for psychiatric
disease.
Sleep and cognitive aging
MESA/MrOS: working with
collaborators from the MESA
and MrOS studies, we
have characterized multiple facets of sleep macro and micro
archtiecture in almost 4,000 older adults, showing how they change
with age and predict cognitive performance. Next we will focus
longitudinally, to look at changes in sleep and cognition over
multiple years.
Harvard Aging Brain Study: in
a collaboraiton led by Jasmeer Chatwal and others, we will be
investigating sleep neurophysiological metrics in relation to PET
imaging markers of cognitive aging.
Contributions of sleep to
preclinical and clinical AD: we will be collaborating on a new
study led by Drs. Jayandra Himali and Matthew Pase, on the
links between sleep, brain morphometry and other imaging measures.
Sleep and cognitive development
RASP and ESP studies:
these ongoing projects aim to compile pediatric sleep studies,
either using retropspective clinical studies, or prospectively
collecting research studies, in order to evaluate the degree to
which the development and maturation of sleep patterns relate to
neurodevelopmental differences in young children. This is a
multi-site collaboration with NIMH Intramural researchers and other
sites (Boston Childrens, Geisinger, New York University, Baylor
College of Medicine).
NIMH toddlers study: we
collaborate NIMH intramural researchers Drs. Ashura Buckley and
Audrey Thurm, looking at how the sleep EEG of very young children
predicts cognitive development.
Sleep and cognitive development
in children: in collaboration with Drs. Leila Tarokh, Mary
Carskadon and Susan Redline, we are characterizing developmental
changes in the sleep EEG, with a focus on functional connectivity
indexed by coherence analysis.