Associate Professor of Neurology
Dr. Lim earned a combined MD/PhD degree from Emory University in Atlanta in 2006. Her PhD thesis identified a gene involved in pair bonding behavior in the monogamous prairie vole (Lim et al., Nature 2004) and was the recipient of the Society for Neuroscience Donald B. Lindsley Prize in 2005. She completed a neurology residency at Washington University in Saint Louis in 2010. There, she studied the role of orexin and the sleep-wake cycle in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease; these studies revealed that sleep and orexin modulate the deposition of amyloid plaques in the brain (Kang, Lim et al., Science 2009). She completed fellowship training in Sleep Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing postdoctoral research that identified a novel dietary therapy composed of branched chain amino acids for the treatment of sleep-wake disturbances following mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) (Lim et al., Science Translational Medicine 2013), and she was awarded the Sleep Research Society Young Investigator Award for this work. Dr. Lim is currently an Assistant Professor at the VA Portland Health Care System and Oregon Health and Science University, and is supported by VA, DoD, NSF, and NIH to perform translational sleep research on rodent models and human subjects.