Dr. Jacqueline van der Meij

Since all animals spend a significant amount of time in a state of reduced consciousness (i.e. sleep), it is thought that sleep has an essential function. Although several hypotheses for the function of sleep have been proposed (e.g. memory consolidation), its exact purpose remains actively debated. During my PhD, I examined the function of sleep by using innovative electrophysiological techniques (e.g. high density array) to make acute and chronic, wireless recordings of brain activity, in both anesthetized and naturally sleeping birds. For my postdoc I will be shifting to rodents, where I will be using electrophysiological methods to study the role of sleep in memory consolidation, by looking into the hippocampal-PFC network while the rodents engage a new spatial navigation/memory task called the Hex Maze.