Prof. Yuval Nir

Prof. Nir is the scientific director of the Sieratzki-Sagol Center for Sleep Medicine at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center ('Ichilov'). Prof. Nir completed his M.Sc. in computer science, Ph.D. in neurobiology, and was trained in sleep research at the world-leading center at UW-Madison. He is currently pursuing ERC- and NIH-funded research on sleep and memory and has won several awards for his research, including the Sieratzki Prize for Neuroscience, the Adelis Prize in Neuroscience, as well as HFSP, EMBO, Fulbright, Teva, and Stanford Wu Tsai awards.

Prof. Nir’s lab studies sleep and cognition, using a combination of human and animal studies. Sleep is essential for supporting cognition, contributes to DNA repair, while changes in sleep in aging and neurodegeneration can contribute to cognitive decline. Research in the lab includes studies of how sleep promotes learning and memory consolidation and how this can be boosted, how sleep changes in aging and in early stages of neurodegeneration, and how sleep can be used to improve medical diagnosis across neurological and psychiatric disorders.