The Division’s Sleep Medicine group conducts research aiming to understand the overall drivers of sleep disorders and guide delivery of appropriate treatments. Current work includes basic research, clinical epidemiology, as well as health systems research aimed at improving care delivery. We highlight specific investigators and programs below that are principally focused on sleep epidemiology and therapeutic delivery.
Dr. Martha (Molly) Billings has an established expertise in sleep health disparities, the environmental and neighborhood contributions to sleep health and disorders. Her current research focuses on sleep apnea treatment disparities, the effects of policies and health structures on adherence. Additionally, she has been involved in clinical trials assessing interventions to improve adherence in sleep apnea in stroke patients.
Yeilim Cho, MD
Dr. Yeilim Cho is a recent awardee of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Physician-Scientist Training Grant. She is currently conducting research on how continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy for sleep apnea improves brain glymphatic function and plasma Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers. Dr. Cho was also recently notified of her selection for the Mentored Physician Scientist Award in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementias (ADRD), a combined award from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Through this recently awarded five-year grant, she will conduct a clinical study to define the role of glymphatic impairment and sleep disruption in the intersection of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sleep apnea, and Alzheimer’s disease risk. Her ultimate goal is to identify Veterans at higher risk of cognitive decline due to impaired sleep health, with the aim of discovering a novel therapy to improve sleep health and mitigate cognitive decline.
Dr. Lucas Donovan conducts research that adapts, tests, and implements care pathways that improve the population reach of effective interventions. His research is supported by over $20 million in awards from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Initiative and VA Health Services Research and Development. Along with his colleagues at VA Puget Sound, he conducts pragmatic trials of weight management interventions, and observational research evaluating the implications of care delivery practices on downstream patient outcomes.
Dr. Sina Gharib founded and directs the Computational Medicine Core at UW’s Center for Lung Biology. He applies state-of-the-art methods to unravel the complex pathophysiology of sleep disorders. His research has identified pathways activated in adipose tissue during sleep apnea, shown that CPAP therapy may alter cancer-associated genes in circulating leukocytes, and leveraging a unique identical twin registry discovered that reduced sleep duration modulates distinct immune functions. He is actively engaged with other investigators world-wide to delineate the genetic underpinnings of insomnia, sleep duration, and sleep apnea.
Dr. Ken He is a full-time clinical faculty with nearly 10 years of experience in sleep medicine and dually boarded in obesity medicine. He recently completed a QI project involved developing a service line agreement with the preoperative medicine/anesthesia clinic to expedite sleep testing in those screened to be high risk for comorbid sleep apnea and hypoventilation disorders in order to better inform surgical risk. He will be a site co-investigator in a multicenter pragmatic trial comparing effects of tirzepatide and CPAP.
Dr. Vishesh Kapur is the founder of the UW Medicine Sleep Center and is actively involved in scholarly pursuits in the areas of clinical epidemiology of sleep apnea, health economics and clinical guideline development. He is the lead author of the AASM Clinical Practice Guideline for Diagnostic Testing for Adult OSA. He participated as a co-investigator in the Sleep Heart Health Study, a prospective cohort study to investigate the relationship between sleep disordered breathing and cardiovascular disease and the Home PAP study, a multisite RCT trial of home versus lab-based management of OSA. He is currently a co-investigator on the study "Links between Cardiovascular Disease, Lung Disease, and Obstructive Sleep Apnea in HIV: Understanding Complex Patients" (5R01HL126538).
Dr. Reena Mehra has 20 years of experience in the conduct of clinical and translational science and leading the Sleep Coordinating Center for multicenter studies pertaining to sleep disorders. As part of her research program, she has mentored more than 40 trainees. She led a collaboration with IBM to leverage a large sleep registry of 200K sleep studies involving multi-modal data collection of physiologic signals serving as a vehicle for artificial intelligence applications and foundational model development.