Current Support:

USA-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF)

SAP Grant Number: 55209185

Award ID: 2020020

Exploring coupled networks of sleep- and wake-promoting neurons and non-equilibrium bursting dynamics of brain rhythms as basis criticality in sleep micro-architecture and sleep-stage transitions.

Major goals:

In this proposal, we hypothesize that arousals are an integral part of sleep regulation and may be necessary to maintain and regulate healthy sleep by releasing accumulated excitations in the regulatory neuronal networks, following SOC-type temporal organization. To address this hypothesis, we propose to combine sleep physiology and data from bio-molecular/genetic experiments with modern concepts from statistical physics and complex networks.

2021-2025

Past Support:

National Institutes of Health (NIH) /

National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI)

Grant No. 1R01HL098437-01A1

Self Organized Criticality as a new paradigm of sleep regulation

Major goals:

To analyze a large database from (i) healthy human subjects; (ii) subjects with insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep apnea and other disorders; (iii) from healthy wild type mice and rats. We will also utilize data from experimental animal models of various sleep disorders, where specific sleep-related neuronal groups and brain areas are targeted, to discern which key elements of the neurobiological interactions may be responsible for the emergence of SOC complexity in sleep dynamics.

2011-2018

USA-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF)

BSF Grant No. 2012219

Dynamical characteristics and phase transitions in physiologic interactions.

Major goals:

To identify basic principles of integration between physiologic systems and investigate the effect of coupling and synchronization on their output dynamics.

2014-2017

Office of Naval Research (ONR)

ONR Grant N000141010078

Complex networks approach to critical transitions and self-organization in sleep.

Major goal:

To investigate the role of arousals in sleep, and to test whether brain dynamics exhibit critical behavior across sleep-stage and arousal transitions.

2009-2014

USA-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF)

BSF No. 2008137

Mechanisms of neural control: from nonequilibrium dynamics of single physiologic systems to integrated synchronization networks

Major goals:

To (i) investigate the origin of the scale-invariant, multifractal and nonlinear temporal structure in physiologic fluctuations, and how it relates to underlying mechanisms of neural regulation of cardiac, respiration and locomotor dynamics; (ii) develop physiologically-motivated models to account for the complex temporal structure in the dynamics of these systems.

2009-2013