Human Sleep Project
About The Human Sleep Project
Our sleep contains a record of our current brain health and future risk for developing brain disease. In partnership with our collaborators, the McCance Center launched the Human Sleep Project to learn what sleep can teach us about brain health and to leverage that knowledge to prevent brain disease and maximize human potential.
Read the Human Sleep Project abstract
The Importance of Sleep
Healthy sleep improves daytime functioning and reduces the risk of developing brain diseases in the future. Currently, sleep assessments are not a part of routine medical care and offered only to those that complain of poor sleep. In addition, sleep assessments are largely inaccessible to communities that are impacted by healthcare disparities.
Our Work
Through the Human Sleep Project, the McCance Center is harvesting vast troves of sleep and health data that exist across research and clinical settings to generate brain health markers that can be routinely monitored in the primary care setting. With our efforts we aim to:
Build Engineering Capacity at Sites
Recruit the most promising scientific leaders and data engineers at contributing sites to our cause, bringing in expertise from across disciplines.
Develop AI/ML Tools that Accelerate Discovery
Recruit the most promising data scientists and brain health researchers to develop groundbreaking AI/ML tools.
Establish Sleep Health Clinics
Stand up a clinic that provides individualized treatment plans to help patients achieve their sleep health goals and the infrastructure to run clinical trials of sleep-based brain health interventions.
Connect with Communities
Recruit community leaders and other representatives to spearhead efforts to understand and navigate the health-related decision challenges of their respective communities
Accelerate Scientific Discovery
Organize public challenges, where research teams compete to create novel algorithms within the Human Sleep Project data archives – publishing the winning entries and making them open-source.
Our Team
Our Collaborators
Best in class institutions from across the nation are joining us in our mission to better understand and harness the power of sleep. We welcome collaborators and partners from academics, industry, research and clinical care to join our effort.
- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: Robert J. Thomas, MD, Haoqi Sun, PhD, Jin Jing, PhD, Daniel Goldenholz, MD, PhD, Mouhsin Shafi, MD, PhD, M. Brandon Westover, MD, PhD
- Massachusetts General Hospital: Valdery Moura Junior, MSc, MBA, Sahar Zafar MD, Alice Lam, MD, PhD, Shibani Mukerji, MD, PhD, Kendrick Shaw, MD, PhD, Sudeshna Das, PhD, Gene Bowman, ND, MPH, Greg Fricchione, MD, Steve Pieper, PhD, Randy Gollub, MD, PhD, Beth Klerman, PhD, MD, Syd Cash, MD, PhD, Seun Akeju, MD, Jonathan Rosand, MD, Rudy Tanzi, PhD
- Boston Children's Hospital: Umakanth Katwa, MD
- Stanford University: Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD
- Emory University: Lynn Marie Trotti, MD, Gari Clifford, PhD,
- Kaiser Permanente: Dennis Hwang, MD
- University of Wisconsin-Madison: Aaron Struck, MD
- Yale School of Medicine: Jennifer Kim, MD, PhD)
- University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign: Jimeng Sun, PhD
- Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis: Fabio Nascimento, MD
- Brigham and Women's Hospital: Jong Woo Lee, MD, PhD
- Duke University: Cynthia Rudin, PhD, Alex Volfovsky, PhD
- University of California San Francisco: Eddy Amorim, MD
- Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine: Eyal Kimchi, MD, PhD
Support the Human Sleep Project
Lying within our sleep patterns is a record of our current brain health and future risk of brain disease. The Human Sleep Project sets out to learn what sleep can teach us about brain health and to leverage that knowledge to prevent brain disease for generations to come.