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Welcome to the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry
The Unit for Experimental Psychiatry, Division of Sleep and Chronobiology in the Department of Psychiatry is a multi-disciplinary group of investigators focused on establishing the nature of the physiological and neurobehavioral changes engendered by sleep loss and circadian rhythmicity.
Basic human translational and clinical research within the laboratory seeks to characterize the relationship between sleep need and circadian physiology and their control of waking neurobehavioral functions and health, as reflected in mood, physiological alertness, attention and cognitive functions, quantitative EEG, oculomotor behavior, cerebral blood flow, endocrine, immune, and inflammatory responses. Research is also conducted on ways to assess effective interventions for and countermeasures to these changes.
Experiments utilizing healthy adult volunteers are conducted in a specially equipped Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory and in the NIH General Clinical Research Center, both in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. The Unit also explores neurobehavioral functioning in response to stress, memory enhancement and distortion, and various pathologies of sleep and wakefulness (e.g. circadian sleep disorders, hypersomnolence syndromes, insomnias, and insufficient sleep syndromes).
The Unit for Experimental Psychiatry and the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology are part of the Center for Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania.