Sue Peters

As a first year student in the Behavioral Neural Sciences PhD program at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, I helped to introduce the first human cognitive neuroscience sleep research at the center, in a computational cognitive neuroscience learning and memory research lab. Using my background as a co-founder of a public mobile computing company, BrainDock, I co-wrote a successful proposal to the NSF Smart and Connected Health program. I co-facilitated the launch of this new area of research: "Long-term Mobile Monitoring and Analysis of Sleep-Cognition Relationship", which has led to novel findings of the trait-like aspects of sleep stages (REM and NonREM) with learning and emotion (in press). In 2012, I joined the Infancy Studies Laboratory, to learn dense EEG (dEEG) analysis skills with application to spontaneous wake brain activity of infants. For my thesis work, I initiated a new area of research in this lab, with a pilot study of infant daytime sleep. This work has led to my passion for understanding sleep microstructure and infant brain development, as it relates to information integration, emotional and cognitive development, and the development and prevention of psychiatric disorders. As an undergraduate student of biomedical engineering and computer science, I have the technical foundation required for work in scientific computing and digital signal processing. I continue to learn new dEEG analysis techniques that are used in adult research, and apply them to infant brain activity. These projects have been presented at various sleep, neuroscience, and learning and memory conferences, and are the foundation toward my long-term goals of combining lab-based research with more ethological monitoring tools, taking advantage of mobile health technologies and citizen science to help us to better understand developmental brain health, and provide mechanisms and interventions which will empower individuals to have a better quality of life.

May 2016