Professor Yuval Nir

Prof. Nir is a sleep investigator at Tel Aviv University and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel. He pursued direct M.Sc. in Computer Science through the TAU interdisciplinary Lautman program for outstanding students, proceeded to a Ph.D. in neurobiology  at the Weizmann Institute (with Rafael Malach), and then to a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, training in sleep research. In 2012, Prof. Nir set up his own lab at Tel Aviv University.

To date, Prof. Nir has published 57 articles, cited over 10,000 times to date. His research has been published in prestigious journals including Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications, Neuron, and he has won several awards and prizes for his research including a recent ERC grant on sleep and memory, the Sieratzki and Adelis prizes for neuroscience, as well as HFSP, EMBO, and Fulbright fellowships. 

Research in the lab focuses on sleep and its relation to cognition: basic research on sleep electrophysiology and sleep functions, the neuronal basis of disconnection from the external environment during sleep and anesthesia (with a focus on the auditory system), wake-promoting neuromodulation (with a focus on the locus-coeruleus noradrenaline system), how sleep promotes learning and memory, and how sleep can be used to improve medical diagnosis in neurological and psychiatric disorders. Diverse experimental approaches are used including human research (intracranial electrophysiology in epilepsy patients, EEG, fMRI, pharmacology, eye tracking) and rodent research (single-neuron electrophysiology, optogenetics, pharmacology).