Attendee Bios

Bio: I’m a postdoctoral research fellow in cognitive neuroscience at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. My main area of interest is in the science of consciousness. My latest research is focused on sleep as a way to study the neurophysiological basis of the loss and recovery of different aspects of consciousness.
Research interest: I'm interested in improving methods for inducing lucid dreams
Website: https://www.benjaminbaird.org/

Bio: Born on the 04.01.1975 in Lüneburg, Germany, married, two daughters.
EDUCATION: 2011 Vienia Docendi in Psychology (Habilitation), University of Basel, Switzerland2008 Doctor of Science (Dr. rer. nat., summa cum laude), University of Trier, Germany2003 Diploma (equivalent to M.Sc.), Psychology, University of Trier, Germany
PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENT: S2013 – present Full professor of Cognitive Biopsychology and Methods at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland2011 - 2013 SNSF Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) at the University of Zürich, Switzerland2008 – 2011 Lecturer and Research Scientist, Division of Cognitive Neuroscience (Prof. De Quervain) and Division of Molecular Psychology (Prof. Papassotiropoulos), University of Basel, Switzerland2003 – 2008 Research Scientist, Institute for Neuroendocrinology (Prof. Born), University of Lübeck, Germany
FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS: 2015 ERC-Starting Grant2015 Vontobel-Price for research in the elderly, University of Zurich2011 SNSF professorship of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)2008 2-year post-doc scholarship, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)2007 Young Scientist Award (Fachgruppe „Biologische Psychologie und Neuropsychologie“ der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie (DGPs))
Research interest: Memory consolidation, sleep, targeted memory reactivation, reactivation and dreaming
Website: https://www3.unifr.ch/psycho/en/research/biopsy/

Bio: Carlyle Smith, (Ph.D., C. Psych.) is Lifetime Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Trent University and Director of Trent University Sleep Research Laboratories (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada). He is an internationally respected expert on the topics of sleep, memory and dreams and has taught courses on these subjects for many years. Dr. Smith was awarded the Trent University Distinguished Research Award in 2000 and the Canadian Sleep Society Distinguished Scientist Award in 2009. His latest book – Heads-Up Dreaming, 2014.
Research interest: I published one of the very first papers on what is now called targeted memory recall [Smith & Weeden (1990). Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa, 15, 85-90.]. I am quite interested in seeing how this field has developed into possibly quite useful and practical applications. In particular, I would like to see if directed dreaming techniques could be used to enhance heads-up dreams.

Bio: Dr. Leslie Ellis is a psychotherapist in private practice with particular expertise in working with dreams, the body and trauma. She has authored many articles, and chapters in these topics and has a book on dreamwork forthcoming from Routledge in August 2019. She is Vice President of the Focusing Institute and adjunct faculty at Adler University.
Research interest: I conduct experiential dreamwork and am always interested in methods that deepen the experiential intensity for the dreamer. My interest is in a confluence of clinical dreamwork, embodied/experiential methods and neuroscience -- both in research and practice, and with the aim of developing clinical methods of dreamwork that create lasting change.

Bio: Elizaveta Solomonova is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Psychiatry and a lecturer in the department of Psychology at McGill University. She works in the Neurophilosophy Lab and is part of the Culture, Mind and BrainElizaveta has received a B.A. in Art History, Psychology and Religious Studies at McGill University (2007), an M.Sc. in Experimental Psychology (2012), and a Ph.D. in Psychiatry and Philosophy at the University of Montreal (2018). She has worked for 13 years at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory, Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. She has completed her first Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2018) at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital.
Research interest: Elizaveta's work blends philosophy of mind and phenomenology with empirical dream and sleep research. She is particularly interested in the relationship betweeElizaveta's graduate research has focused on dreams, stimulus incorporation, sleep architecture, memory consolidatDuring her first postdoctoral fellowship at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Elizaveta studied the rHer current research projects at the Neurophilosophy Lab, Culture Mind and Brain research group, consist of three main streams: 2) dreams, theory of mind and empathy; and 3) social determinants of sleep quality.

Bio: I work as an attending physician at the Center for Investigation and Research on Sleep of the Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland. After my neurology residency and specialization in sleep medicine in Lausanne and Zürich, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, where I investigated the EEG correlates of dreaming using a serial awakening paradigm and high-density EEG recordings. I currently direct a research group studying changes in dream consciousness that occur in sleep disorders (insomnia, parasomnia), with the aim of better understanding these conditions and exploring treatment options.
Research interest: I am interested in finding ways to automatically detect and modulate dreaming in patients with dream-related complaints.

Bio: Dr. Mashour is an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist who leads an NIH-funded research group focused on the translational neuroscience of consciousness and unconsciousness. He is the founding director of the Center for Consciousness Science at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Research interest: We have explored, in animals and humans, how we might pharmacologically "engineer" general anesthesia to be more like sleep, in particular to induce a REM-like state (active cortex, higher cholinergic tone, dream-like phenomenology) during what is typically more of a slow-wave state (suppressed cortex, lower cholinergic tone, lower probability of phenomenology).

Bio: I am a PhD student at Northwestern University studying lucid dreaming and dream manipulation.
Research interest: My current research focuses on applying targeted memory reactivation to dreaming and lucid dreaming studies. Currently, I am working on improving lucid dream induction in the lab and two-way communication from a lucid dreamer to an experimenter.

Bio: Ken’s research focuses on memory, consciousness, and related issues. He is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, where he also directs the NIH-funded Training Program in the Neuroscience of Human Cognition. He received his training at UCLA (BS), UC San Diego (PhD), and as a postdoc at Yale, Manchester, and Berkeley. His work using EEG, neuropsychology, and neuroimaging has contributed to understanding the neural substrates of human memory. In this work, he has contrasted conscious memory experiences with various ways in which memory can influence behavior in the absence of awareness of memory retrieval, as in implicit social bias, priming, and intuition. Recent studies from his lab showed that sensory processing during sleep can reinforce prior learning, providing novel evidence on sleep’s role in memory. Research papers are available at http://pallerlab.psych.northwestern.edu/.
Website: http://www.northwestern.edu/people/kap

Bio: Kendra Holt Moore is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Religion at Boston University where she studies psychology of religion. She holds a Bachelor of Behavioral Sciences from Hardin-Simmons University and a Master of Theological Studies from Boston University. Kendra is interested in using implicit bias research and Terror Management Theory to understand the formation of the religious imagination and its influence on human belief and behavior.
Research interest: See bio for summary of research interests; my involvement in dream engineering was as the lead research assistant on a pilot study for nightmare anxiety, and it was this research project that granted me incredible experience in managing a research team and conducting a study with human participants. This project has sharpened my own research skills.

Bio: Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. in Psychophysiology from Stanford University (1980). As a Research Associate in the Stanford University Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology he was engaged in laboratory research for 25 years, pioneering the field of lucid dreaming. He is the author of Lucid Dreaming and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, and a co-founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD).

Bio: Martin Dresler is principal investigator of the Donders Sleep & Memory Lab. Originally trained in biopsychology, philosophy and mathematics, he switched to cognitive neuroscience for his PhD and postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Oxford University and Stanford University before establishing his own lab at the Donders Institute.
Research interest: Cognitive neuroscience of sleep, dreaming, lucid dreaming.
Website: https://dreslerlab.org

Bio: I'm a psychologist with a particular interest in the neurocognitive aspects of sleep and dreaming. During my PhD I examined the neuropsychological functions and electrophysiological features of subjects with frequent nightmares (idiopathic nightmare disorder). Currently, I work with psychometric tools, behavioral and neuroscientific methods (mainly EEG) to study different aspects of chronotype, sleep EEG oscillations and the role of sleep in emotional and cognitive information processing. Currently, I am deeply absorbed in the exploration of REM sleep microstates with the hope to contribute a little bit to the understanding of this truly paradoxical sleep state. My future aim is to integrate the findings of basic sleep research into the clinical field and to use biological markers to facilitate the diagnoses and treatment of patients with sleep complaints.
Research interest: The aim of the Budapest Laboratory of Sleep and Cognition (led by Péter Simor) is to examine human behavior with a special focus on sleep and its role in information processing. In our view, sleep provides an exciting “natural environment” to explore and unravel the neural activity of the brain as well as its more specific functions or dysfunctions. Our research topics extend from basic neurophysiological studies to more complex experiments focusing also on the behavioral level. Our aim is to understand sleep and sleep-related cognitive and affective processes in their entirety integrating multiple (physiological, cognitive and phenomenological) levels of analyses.
Website: https://budapestsleeplab.com/

Bio: Robert Stickgold is an associate professor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He received his B.A from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, both in biochemistry. He has published over 100 scientific publications, including papers in Science and Nature. His work looks at the nature and function of sleep and dreams from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, with an emphasis on their role in memory consolidation and integration, and how defects in these processes contribute to psychiatric disorders, including PTSD and schizophrenia. His work is funded NIMH.
Research interest: I study dreams!!
Website: https://www.sleepandcognition.org/

Bio: Professor Stuart Fogel Professor at uOttawa School of Psychology Director of sleep neuroscience at Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research Member, University of Ottawa Brain and Mind Research InstituteDr. Stuart Fogel is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Ottawa and Director of sleep neuroscience at the Royal’s Institute for Mental Health Research. His research focusses on the function of sleep for learning, memory and cognition. He helped lead the discovery that bursts of brain activity during sleep are associated with overnight enhancement of newly formed memory, and are an electrophysiological marker of intellectual abilities. He has published highly cited peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals, and has given dozens of talks about his research around the world where he advocates for the importance of sleep to support good physical and mental health.
Research interest: Interested in the functions of sleep to support memory, cognition, intelligence, performance and related dream content.
Website: https://socialsciences.uottawa.ca/sleep-lab/

Bio: For over 30 years, my research in the Dream & Nightmare Laboratory has concerned the neuroscience of dreaming and nightmares. I direct a 2-bed sleep laboratory in the Montreal Sacre-Coeur Hospital in which we use a variety of polysomnographic, electrophysiologic and brain imaging methods to quantify sleep. We have focused on quantifying the physiological differences between REM and NREM dreaming, on determing the delayed memory sources of dreaming (day-residue and dream-lag effects), on characterizing the neurophysiological basis of nightmares and a variety of other topics. In recent years, our focus has been on relationships between dreaming and NREM sleep events, like sleep spindles and the possible role of dreaming in sleep-dependent memory consolidation.
Research interest: My lab has studied several neurobiological correlates of dream recall and dream content including EEG power, localization and coherence, sleep macro- and microstructure (e.g., sleep spindles), SPECT and fMRI brain imaging, and EMG activity. We have also assessed the effects of external stimuli on dream content, including the effects of films and virtual environments. We have assessed the correlates and memory sources of both REM/NREM dreams and brief sleep onset images. We have examined the role of dreaming in sleep-dependent memory processes.
Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tore_Nielsen

Bio: Claudia Picard-Deland, B.Sc., is a Neuroscience PhD student at the University of Montreal. She has been working at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory, directed by Tore Nielsen, since fall 2016. She uses polysomnography, targeted memory reactivation, and virtual reality to investigate the relationship between dreaming and memory consolidation processes.
Research interest: Our study uses a VR flying-task to investigate the effect of targeted memory reactivation on gross procedural skills and dream content. We are also interested in the dynamic of memory incorporation in dreams following an immersive VR experience.

Bio: I am a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and completed my PhD in Psychology at the University of Sheffield, UK. My current research focuses on how the brain selects memories to be consolidated during sleep. I am using high density EEG to find markers at initial encoding that predict whether a memory will be consolidated during subsequent sleep.
Research interest: Previously I have researched the nature and correlates of 'unusual sleep experiences' including sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, and exploding head syndrome. I am interested in sleep and dreaming more generally, including their neural underpinnings, and relationship to memory consolidation processes.

Bio: 2012Venia Docendi (Umhabilita1993Educational training as an electrician at the Siemens Company in Mannheim, Germany
Research interest: Relation of sport and sleep
Website: http://www.ispw.unibe.ch/ueber_uns/personen/erlacher_daniel/index_ger.html

Bio: Dr. Pardilla-Delgado joined the Familial Dementia Neuroimaging Lab as a postdoctoral fellow in September 2017, after finishing his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. His main research interests are memory consolidation and transformation. His research has focused on the interactions between sleep and memory, as well as stress and memory. Most of his previous work has focused on the consolidation of gist-based false memories after a period of acute stress or a night of sleep. Enma’s interests in the lab include investigating functional changes in the brain, particularly in memory-relevant structures, in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. He's also interested in how sleep is disrupted in preclinical AD. He enjoys playing basketball (in real life, and in video games), Doctor Who, Latin dancing, and (occasionally) going to the gym.
Research interest: Enma's main interest is memory consolidation and transformation. During graduate school he worked with gist-based false memories in humans and how sleep affects their processing. Currently, he's working towards identifying possible markers of preclinical Alzheimer's in sleep patterns and physiology. Regarding dreams, his interests lie in the crossroads between memory and dreaming: how are dreams affected by memory and how is memory affected by dreams?

Bio: I am a research assistant in a Sleep and Anxiety Lab through the Department of Psychiatry with MGH. I work under the supervision of Dr. Edward Pace-Schott and assist on a project investigating sleep disturbances and hyperarousal symptoms in trauma-exposed individuals.
Research interest: I am very interested in dream disturbances like nightmares as they pertain to people with PTSD and other anxiety disorders.

Bio: Cherrysse is a junior at Bates College, majoring in neuroscience and minoring in education. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience.
Research interest: We examined the association of nightmares and bad dreams with composite index scores of psychopathology and hyperarousal among individuals exposed to a PTSD Criterion-A trauma.

Bio: I'm a Ph.D student in Ken Paller's lab at Northwestern. My research focuses on applications of targeted memory reactivation and understanding the cognitive role of neural oscillations.
Research interest: I am interested in developing techniques to induce lucid dreams and trigger behavior during sleep, as well as developing technology to monitor and influence sleep processes using consumer devices.

Bio: Perrine Ruby is a researcher in the Dynamic & cognition team (DYCOG) of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL). Interest: dreaming, sleep, self, social cognition and neuroimaging.
Research interest: Cerebral correlates of deam recall frequency, characteristics of dream content, function of dreaming
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/perrineruby/home

Bio: I'm a PhD student studying short-term memory and attention using fMRI.
Research interest: I'm interested in varying levels of memory and attention across the sleep/wake cycle, especially those that are re-instated during lucid dreams.

Bio: Ryan is a first-year Cognitive Neuroscience PhD student in the laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Kensinger at Boston College. Prior to graduate school he spent nearly three years studying sleep-dependent emotional memory processing in individuals with emotional disorders in the laboratory of Dr. Edward Pace-Schott at the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.
Research interest: My current research focuses on sleep's contribution to the neural re-expression of emotional episodic memories and I plan to explore the role of dream content in this process.

Bio: Tony is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Harvard Medical School T32 Program in Sleep, Circadian, and Respiratory Neurobiology. He is currently working with primary supervisors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Boston College. Tony's long-term research focus is on understanding the roles of sleep and stress in emotion and memory processing, and how knowledge of these systems can be applied to clinical populations. In choosing to pursue clinical training within a cognitive neuroscience lab, Tony's background in research and academics have provided strong initial preparation to carve a niche at the intersection between neuroscience and clinical practice. His distinct, diverse, and demanding work history have uniquely positioned him to become a contributor and advocate for neuroscience within clinical research, uncovering potential underlying mechanisms that can be translated into clinical intervention.
Research interest: Tony's research is focused on the processing of emotional content and memory during sleep. He is interested in the role that dreams might play in this system.

Bio: Tara Youngblood is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Kryo Inc. As a serial entrepreneur, she has started and exited multiple companies. Since launching the ChiliPad in 2007, Tara has spent over 10,000 hours studying the science of sleep. Applying her analytical skills from her physics and engineering background, her passion currently is to shape the future of sleep-driven health by making sleep easy and drug-free. Tara is a visionary leader, combining multiple disciplines, including Alternative Medicine, Physics, and Sleep Diagnostics. She works with leading international researchers to further studies on cold therapy and its impact on sleep. Her research has led to over a dozen patent filings, a complete patent portfolio on sleep and its future space as a hub for health.
Research interest: I am interested in the physiological processes that regulate the timing, duration, intensity and density of sleep, as well as the quality of wakefulness. My work focuses on homeostatic and circadian regulatory processes, as studied by quantitative analysis of sleep cycle dynamics during sleep and wakefulness, especially in relation to cold therapy throughout the night. I conduct studies mostly field-based settings, and I am experienced in a wide range of techniques used in sleep research. I am particularly interested in the effects of sleep loss on more subtle aspects of human behavior such as stress, cognition, and physical functions. As an extension through the Wake Forest Integrated Medicine group, Dream engineering is of particular interest in how it impact stress, cognitive and creative outcomes and physical endurance.

Bio: Ho-Jun Suk is currently a Medical Engineering/Medical Physics Ph. D. student in the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign respectively.
Research interest: My research in the Synthetic Neurobiology Group led by Professor Ed Boyden focuses on the development, optimization, and application of non-invasive brain modulation tools and strategies. These strategies include non-invasive deep brain stimulation using temporal interference (Grossman et al., 2017) and modulation of brain oscillations using sensory stimulation. Temporal interference uniquely enables non-invasive stimulation of a specific brain region by utilizing multiple high frequency electric fields whose interference produces a prominent electric field envelope that affects the neural activity only at a desired location inside the brain. The ability to stimulate targeted regions inside the brain makes temporal interference a potentially useful tool for applications that require focused and region-specific brain modulation. On the other hand, sensory (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile) stimulation relies on the natural neural pathways that are responsible for detecting and processing sensory information. Although previous works have shown that stimuli that target a certain sense can effectively modulate neural oscillations in the primary sensory area of the brain that is responsible for that sense, the effect of combining multiple sensory stimuli is not well understood. I am trying to develop and optimize strategies for combining multiple sensory stimuli for maximal neural response at multiple brain regions, which may be useful for applications that require a global modulation of brain activity. Given sleep and dreams have been closely linked to specific brain oscillations and activities at various parts of the brain, I believe the non-invasive tools I am working on may become a useful tool for modulating sleep or dreams.

Bio: Mostafa (Neo) Mohsenvand is a PhD student at MIT, working on combining Artificial Intelligence and human intelligence. He records his life on video alongside his brainwaves and bio signals in order to build a personalized artificial memory system. He is also building prosthetic memory systems and applications for people suffering from Alzheimer’s and Dementia. His work has been covered in MIT Technology Review, Quartz Magazine, Fast Company and Vice. His background is in Mathematics, Neuroscience and Engineering.
Research interest: Modern machine learning allows us to extract meaningful information from very noisy sources. We are using deep neural networks to create new representations for EEG signals that are more interpretable than raw signals. In particular, we are building AI enabled Neurofeedback systems that are capable of providing high-bandwidth feedback to the users.

Bio: Pedro Lopes is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, where he leads a research group that asks the question: what if interfaces would share part of our body? Pedro has materialized these ideas by creating interactive systems intentionally borrow parts of the user’s body for input and output; allowing computers to be more directly interwoven in our bodily senses and actuators. One specific flavor of such devices that Pedro has extensively explored is devices that borrow the user’s muscles by means of electrical muscle stimulation. These devices use part of the wearer’s body for output, i.e., the computer can output by actuating the user’s muscles with electrical impulses, causing it to move involuntarily. The wearer can sense the computer’s activity on their own body by means of their sense of proprioception. Pedro’s wearable systems have shown to (1) increase realism in VR, (2) provide a novel way to access information through proprioception, and (3) serve as a platform to experience and question the boundaries of our sense of agency. Pedro’s work is published at top-tier conferences (ACM CHI & UIST) and demonstrated at venues such as SIGGRAPH and IEEE Haptics. Pedro has received the CHI Best Paper award for his work on Affordance++, Best Talk Awards and a Best Paper nomination. As part of his research, Pedro has exhibited at Ars Electronica 2017, Science Gallery Dublin and World Economic Forum in San Francisco. His work also captured the interest of media, such as MIT Technology Review, NBC, Discovery Channel, NewScientist or Wired. Previously, Pedro was a PhD student with Prof. Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany.
Research interest: If we start to interface more directly and bidirectionally with the human body via muscle sensing and muscle actuation, we are able to not only sense possible dream states but, in return, influence the physicality of the dream states/content by proprioceptive manipulation.
Website: https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~pedrolopes

Bio: I am a 4th year PhD candidate at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
Research interest: My research intersects multiple disciplines, including positive psychology, virtual reality, sensation and perception, and human-computer interfaces. At the moment, I am focusing on how we can better support self-transcendent experiences with immersive, interactive technologies and biofeedback. My interest in dream engineering is to connect with other researchers for potential collaboration.
Website: http://ispacelab.com/alex-kitson

Bio: Balaji Goparaju is a Data Scientist at Novartis InstiBalaji is based in Cambridge and working to develop novel digital endpoints in clinical trials that use contact and nPreviously he worked at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston analyzing physiological data, and patient-reported outcomes from sleep studies. He has a Master's degree from Boston University where he used fMRI and graph theory to study patients performing computer-generated tasks to measure neural activity.
Research interest: We are interested in the scientific methods and techniques of dream engineering and learning more about its applications to patient health

Bio: I am Clinical Research Coordinator working with Dr. Edward Pace-Schott on his two studies exploring the role of sleep in anxiety disorders.
Research interest: I am extremely interested in how sleep can become a treatment target for psychopathology. Part of implementing such treatments is knowing how technology can be a resource to patients in addition to communicating patients' needs to the engineering community.

Bio: Dara Manoach is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She received her doctorate from Harvard University, completed a psychology internship at McLean Hospital and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology at Beth Israel Hospital. At MGH she directs the Sleep, Cognition and Psychopathology Laboratory (SCAN Lab). http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/manoachlab
Research interest: The primary goal of my research program is to understand the contribution of abnormal sleep to the cognitive deficits and symptoms of schizophrenia and autism We use multimodal neuroimaging techniques to illuminate the neural bases of sleep-dependent deficits and to evaluate novel treatments.
Website: https://manoachlab.mgh.harvard.edu/

Bio: Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D. is a psychologist on the 1:1048576 of Harvard where she teaches courses on dreams to undergraduates, psychiatry residents & psychology interns, and lectures on hypnosis. She is Past President of both the International Association for the Study of Dreams and The Society for Psychological Hypnosis. She has written four books including The Committee of Sleep, The Pregnant Man: Cases from a Hypnotherapist’s Couch, and Supernormal Stimuli She is the editor of four additional books including The New Science of Dreaming, Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, and Trauma and Dreams. She is Editor-in-Chief of the international journal, DREAMING. Dr. Barrett has published dozens of academic articles and chapters on dreams, hypnosis, sleep talking, and evolutionary psychology. Her current work focuses on dreams and creative problem solving.
Research interest: My work to date has involved low-tech dream engineering via bedtime dream incubation and hypnotic suggestion to influence factors like dream recall, dream content, lucidity, and nightmare frequency. I am potentially interested in combining these approaches with the type of technology pioneered by the MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group.
Website: http://www.deirdrebarrett.com/

Bio: We each spend about a third of our lives sleeping. Why? As a cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Erin Wamsley studies this relatively uncharted territory, exploring the function of sleep, the brain basis of dreaming, and the role of resting states in memory consolidation more broadly. After receiving her PhD in 2007 and spending 7 years as a postdoctoral fellow and than an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Wamsley joined the faculty at Furman University in 2014, where she directs the Furman Sleep Laboratory.
Research interest: Despite decades of research effort, the brain basis of dreaming is still poorly understood. The development of new methods to experimentally manipulate the dream experience and its neural substrates could provide a breakthrough in this area.
Website: http://www.furmansleeplab.com

Bio: Systems engineer with interest in human interfaces and real-time signal processing.
Research interest: I am interested in communication to and from lucid dreams, as well as understanding how the body is represented in dreams.
Website: http://www.ethanoblak.com/

Bio: I have a varied background in engineering, musical instrument design/building, and sleep research. I've spent the better part of the last decade looking for ways to help people sleep better, and currently lead a diverse team of engineers and researchers who passionately seek solutions to solve the world's sleep problems!
Research interest: I have a deep curiosity about dreams and the alternative reality our minds create when we sleep.

Bio: Javier Hernandez is a Research Scientist at the Affective Computing group of the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Emotional Navigation and Onsite Stress Measurement special interest groups. Hernandez is also founder and CEO of Global Vitals LLC, an MIT Media Lab spin-off with the goal of democratizing physiological sensing. His research is focused on the development of emotionally intelligent tools to further the understanding of humans while fostering greater health and quality of life, including contributions to daily life stress and the use of technology to improve its measurement, understanding, and management. Hernandez holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab and an MS from the Robotics Institute at CMU.
Research interest: My research is focused on the development of emotionally intelligent tools to further the understanding of humans while fostering greater health and quality of life. In particular, I have made several contributions in the context of daily life stress and the use of technology to improve its measurement, understanding, and management.
Website: http://www.javierhr.com

Bio: Jeff's research in Sleep Health, particularly with individualized sleep behavior change interventions, led Northwestern athletics to invite Jeff to uncover why their athletes weren’t sleeping, build novel digital interventions to improve total sleep time and sleep quality, and understand the relationship between sleep and athletic performance outcomes. Jeff was awarded a Northwestern University research prize for his work entitled: Technology Mediated Sleep Improvement System and published one of the first known peer reviewed papers on the subject in the journal Sleep Health, to show an objective improvement in total sleep time by over an hour. They’ve since completed eleven validation case studies on sleep improvement in professional and collegiate athletics and work with customers across the every major league. They are now working with Fortune 500 companies to help their employees be more productive at work.
Research interest: I've been working on researching and translating individualized interventions to improve sleep health in the general population.
Website: http://www.risescience.com

Bio: Jim Gray is research scientist and learning lead in the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab, where he provides learning-related mentorship, teaching, and leadership. Previously, Jim was VP of Learning Design at Sesame Workshop, Director of Learning at LeapFrog Enterprises, and consultant to educational technology organizations such as DreamBox Learning, Toca Boca, StoryBots, Kidaptive, and Disney Imagicademy. Research: As head of the LeapFrog Kid Lab, Jim was responsible for product testing and efficacy research. Jim has conducted academically-oriented research at the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies at SRI International / UC Berkeley, and Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Writing: Jim’s writing includes peer reviewed articles such as “Putting education in “educational” apps: Lessons from the science of learning”, book chapters in Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, and Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning, and blogs on topics like digital play. Jim has a BA in Early Childhood Education from Michigan State University, an advanced degree in Interactive Media Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and a Doctorate of Education from Harvard University. He is the father of two elementary school children, and at home he loves inventing toys and playful learning activities for his whole family.
Research interest: My Learning Archetype project is fundamentally about diverse ways of knowing, including the subconscious, unconscious, and/or the sleeping mind. Personally, I read and followed the methods of Stephen LaBerge on lucid dreaming when I was an undergraduate student, and continue to monitor my dreams for insights, and use naps strategically in my problem-solving approaches.

Bio: I'm the lead engineer from BrainCo making prosthetic hands. I'm also a contractor in MIT Media Lab.
Research interest: Neural Science
Website: http://www.junqingqiao.com

Bio: Lee Jones serves Bose Corporation's Wellness Division. Responsibilities include R&D, new product development, technology development, business strategy, and M&A support. He has a BSME from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MSME from The University of Texas at Austin, both in Mechanical Engineering. Lee lives in Austin, Texas.
Research interest: I think dreaming is a teachable skill and I'd like as many people as possible to learn it and benefit from the experience.

Bio: Louis Kang is a PhD student at Harvard studying Applied Physics. Louis received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) and Materials Science and Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.
Research interest: Currently, Louis is working the connectome research utilizing next-generation microscopy techniques. Louis is interested in further elucidating neural circuits that are known to be associated with sleeping and dreaming.

Bio: Professor Wilson received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his PhD. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1994 where he studies the role of sleep in learning and memory, and brain systems that contribute to spatial navigation, and decision-making, and their possible involvement in neurological diseases and disorders through the use of microelectrode arrays implanted in the brains of freely behaving rodents. He is currently Associate Director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, and Associate Director of the Center for Brains Minds and Machines.
Research interest: By introducing arrays of microelectrodes into hippocampal and neocortical areas of freely behaving rodents we have been able to examine the coordinated activity of ensembles of large numbers of individual cells and relate this ensemble activity to behavioral performance and memory. By examining subsequent changes in neural activity during sleep we have begun elucidating the nature of memory processing and consolidation during these periods.

Bio: I do research on the role of sleep on emotional memory and especially the consolidation and generalization of fear learning.
Research interest: I am interested in if sleep can somehow be manipulated in a way so that it processes an emotional event in a more adaptive way. Affecting dreams could be a potential way of doing that.

Bio: Szymon Fedor leads several studies at MIT Media Lab where he uses Affective Computing and body-worn devices to study mental health illnesses. He has over decade of research related to wearable technologies and embedded systems. Prior to his current appointment, he carried out research in Ericsson and United Technologies Research Center, contributing to commercial solutions based on consumer electronics. He holds a M.Sc. in Telecommunications with First Class Honours and a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He published a book, a book chapter and over 20 papers in peer reviewed journals and conferences. He also holds five patents.
Research interest: I research new methods for diagnosing and improving depression using wearables and mobile phone. Changes in sleep are very related to depression. I am interested in new methods for monitoring the quality of sleep and improving it.

Bio: Co-Founder of Kryo Inc. Serial Entrepreneur with 20 years of commercial experience with sleep orientated products with several successful exits.
Research interest: Programming Sleep through temperature modulation.
Website: https://ooler.co/

Bio: Tristan is a biologist, Master in Neurophysiology and PhD in Neuroscience, Buenos Aires University. He has been an EU Marie Curie Fellow and senior researcher at the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, and a Fyssen fellow at ICM, Paris. He has also been an Invited Researcher at QBI, Australia and INECO, Argentina. Since 2011 he leads the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Lab, now at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK. He is a Wellcome Trust Fellow and now Turing Institute Fellow
Research interest: I am interested in the content of dreams and dream-like events in the hypnagogic state, its neural and cognitive features and its possible mechanisms.
Website: https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/research/bekinschtein-laboratory-consciousness-and-cognition

Bio: Philosopher specializing in the scientific study of the human condition; co-founder with neuroscientist and dream specialist Patrick McNamara of the Center for Mind and Culture, a multidisciplinary research center seeking to solve pressing social problems using hi-tech resources.
Research interest: VR simulation of dream states and VR treatment of nightmares
Website: https://www.mindandculture.org

Bio: Zach Kabelac graduated with his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2019. Zach received the Jacobs Presidential Fellowship in 2014 and completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at MIT in 2012. He has been researching the underlying technology for Emerald since, which he presented to President Obama in the White House.
Research interest: I am developing a remote sensing technology that allows for the collection of physiological signals without touching the user in anyway. It has been shown to capture vital signs as well as sleep and I am exploring the use of this technology in measuring sleep as a symptom of various diseases.