Map and manipulate sleep oscillations to reveal their role in healthy cognitive development

Sleep is essential to all animal life. But why are sleep needs greater in young mammals? Evidence points to a key role in cognitive development.

Sleep correlates with brain immaturity, and sleep dysfunctions are frequent comorbidities of neurodevelopment disorders. As screens invade their bedrooms, children are sleeping less and less, and learning disorders are on the rise.

This is a growing public health concern.There is increasing evidence that poor sleep at critical development stages may facilitate the emergence of neural disorders. Yet this is only correlative, but not causal evidence. How does sleep architecture differ in immature brains? Are specific sleep oscillations needed for neural maturation?

What type of neural computations do they support? Can sleep dysfunctions directly contribute to social, cognitive or learning impairments?

These crucial questions are still largely unanswered due to technical limitations.I propose to harness new concepts and tools from diverse fields of research, to launch an ambitious program bridging neurodevelopment biology, systems neuroscience and sleep research.

Because of our interdisciplinary approach, my team is in the unique position to pioneer breakthrough in vivo recordings and optogenetics in rat pups.

I plan to record and decode neural activity from multiple brain areas, while automatically scoring sleep in freely behaving pups, this in order to elucidate the computational mechanisms at play during developmental sleep.I will combine high density recordings with recent advances in viral, molecular and CRIPSR tools to 1) Map and 2) Impair sleep – or associated oscillatory mechanisms, with the aim to reveal their 3) Impact on healthy development.

My ambition is to set the stage for a new line of research in developmental systems neuroscience.

I propose to study the emergence of neural computations, infer their roles across the lifespan, and reveal sleep as a prime target for therapeutics in development disorders.