Among the many unanswered questions in biology, one of the most persistent and perplexing is why animals sleep. Despite significant advances in our understanding of the regulation and neurobiology of sleep—and the well-documented effects of sleep loss on cognitive and physiological performance—the fundamental question of why the brain needs sleep remains unresolved.
Dr. Marcos Frank’s laboratory is focused on uncovering the cellular mechanisms underlying sleep homeostasis, with particular interest in how sleep regulation intersects with sleep function. As part of this work, the lab investigates the role of glial cells in the accumulation and discharge of sleep pressure, as well as in synaptic plasticity in vivo.
In this talk, Dr. Frank will present recent findings from his lab demonstrating that astrocytes play critical roles in the expression and regulation of sleep. His group has shown that the release of gliotransmitters from astrocytes influences sleep drive in mammals, that astrocytes undergo dynamic changes in activity across the sleep-wake cycle and following sleep deprivation, and that specific subpopulations of forebrain astrocytes may be essential for sustaining wakefulness. Given their additional roles in modulating synaptic plasticity, astrocytes are uniquely positioned to link the regulation of sleep with its hypothesized functions.
Dr. Frank received his PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University and completed postdoctoral research in the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He served as Assistant and then Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (Department of Neuroscience) from 2003 to 2013. In 2014, he joined Washington State University (now the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine), where he served as the Inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences from 2016 to 2020.