research vision

Why do we sleep when we do? And what happens when that timing breaks down? My research sits at the intersection of circadian biology, sleep science, and quantitative behavioral ecology. I study how internal biological clocks, distributed across the brain and body, coordinate to produce stable, rhythmic behaviors, and how organisms recover when those rhythms are disrupted by the environment.

What I’ve Built and Found
A significant part of my early research was methodological, because the tools to answer my questions didn’t yet exist. I developed naturalistic light regimes that allow clean measurement of circadian entrainment in Drosophila without the confounds introduced by standard laboratory conditions. I then formalized and validated the first two-process model of sleep for flies; a framework that quantifies both the circadian and homeostatic processes governing sleep timing and amount. What makes this particularly significant is that, outside of humans, neither process had ever been jointly parameterized in any system. My work in Drosophila changed that, opening the door to mechanistic, quantitative sleep research in a genetically tractable organism. In parallel, my colleague (Budha Chowdhury) and I developed a yoked-control paradigm to isolate true homeostatic sleep rebound from mechanical stress artifacts, providing much cleaner measures of sleep recovery post deprivation. Building on these foundations, I developed a behavioral state classification algorithm that identifies discrete sleep states from continuous activity records. This revealed that Drosophila exhibits separable sleep states with distinct homeostatic and circadian signatures, findings that set up a compelling and tractable question: how does the circadian system actually time deep sleep, and which clocks in the body are doing the work?

Where my Research is Headed
My immediate aims follow directly from this question. The brain’s central circadian clock is the canonical timekeeper, but there is growing evidence, in flies and mammals alike, that peripheral clocks in visceral tissues such as the gut and fat bodies play an active role in regulating physiology and behavior. I am investigating whether these peripheral clocks work alongside the brain clock as part of a distributed timekeeping network that sets the timing and amplitude of deep sleep. I am also working to identify the specific metabolites and neuropeptides, including gut-derived signals, that may carry circadian timing information from peripheral tissues to the brain. The goal is to map how central and peripheral clocks interact through the gut-brain axis to regulate deep sleep, with direct relevance to understanding how circadian disruption contributes to metabolic and physiological dysfunction in humans.

My Longterm Vision
Over the next decade and beyond, I want to understand a more fundamental question: what determines whether a biological rhythm is flexible enough to adapt to a shifting environment, yet stable enough to resist being reset by noise or transient disturbance? This balance between plasticity and rigidity in circadian timekeeping has consequences that extend well beyond sleep. It touches on how organisms of all kinds respond to environmental variability, how populations persist through ecological disruption, and how timing-related traits evolve under selection. My group will pursue these questions using neurogenetics, dynamical modeling, and computational analyses of behavioral time series, with the goal of building predictive, mechanistic insight into one of biology’s most fundamental phenomena.