During this panel discussion we will be joined by UTK faculty members whose research areas center around various aspects of sleep. This will be an opportunity to ask questions and further your understanding of the topic.

Theresa M. Lee is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of psychology, appointed in January 2012. She came to UT from the University of Michigan where she was a professor, research scientist and department chair for 24 years. Dr. Lee’s areas of research included the study of biological rhythms, both annual and daily physiological and behavioral rhythms, including reproductive and other hormones, developmental timing of puberty, physical growth patterns, and behavioral patterns such as timing of sleep, mating and hibernation. A major interest has been how these physiological and behavioral patterns differ by species, age, sex and habitat. Dr. Lee’s research has included the study of several wild rodent species, laboratory rats and mice, and sheep. This field of study is now called Behavioral Neuroscience, but started for Dr. Lee as a fascination about animals on the farm and animals and plants in the woods and fields around her childhood home Those interests led her into college to study Biology, Psychology and the wider Humanities.

Ralph Lydic serves as Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee and holds a Joint Faculty appointment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Ralph is a neuroscientist working to better understand how the brain regulates sleep and breathing. Past appointments include Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and endowed professorships at Pennsylvania State University and University of Michigan. Ralph was recruited to the University of Tennessee in 2014.  He is a committed educator and has trained 25 post-doctoral fellows and 10 Ph.D. students. More than 50 undergraduate students have earned co-authorship on peer-reviewed publications or abstracts while working in his laboratory.  Ralph is interested in communicating science to non-scientists. Approximately 50,000 viewers have completed the first on-line sleep course that he co-developed at University of Michigan. Ralph has provided invited interviews on neuroscience and sleep to WUOT radio, WBIR television, the Knoxville News Sentinel, and numerous community organizations.

Helen Baghdoyan serves as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee. Her desire for a career in neuroscience was kindled at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine where she was awarded an undergraduate student research scholarship. The realization that chemistry and biology could be used to understand the brain basis of behavior launched her career in neuroscience research. During Helen’s postdoctoral and junior faculty years in the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, she studied the neurochemical mechanisms that regulate sleep and wakefulness in the context of the relationship between sleep disruption and mental disorders. Subsequent professorial appointments in anesthesiology at the medical schools of Pennsylvania State University and the University of Michigan encouraged extension of my research to altered states of consciousness caused by anesthetic drugs.  Current UT appointments as Professor of Psychology and Beaman Professor, as well as a joint appointment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, provide a unique opportunity to advance a mechanistic understanding of naturally occurring and drug-induced states of consciousness.