Name: Aaron Sampson
Hometown: Norman, Oklahoma and Rice Lake, Wisconsin
Hobbies: Taekwondo, hiking
What do you study? I work on developing new tools and techniques for analyzing human brain activity. Specifically, I look at recordings from the sleeping brain, and try to detect specific events, called sleep spindles, that occur during sleep. I have also worked on applying the same techniques to understanding how the brains of people with schizophrenia might process sounds differently.
Why is it important? Sleep is very important for a number of reasons—one important function of sleep is supporting the process of forming long-term memories. Abnormal sleep spindle activity is also associated with some disorders of the brain, like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, so detecting them reliably can be important for clinical treatment too. The techniques that I help develop for this project could also be useful in other studies, since they are related to fundamental properties of the brain.
What do you like about being a scientist? I find science very satisfying because I can spend every day trying to understand something that no one else has fully understood before. And even though it can take a long time to make new discoveries, I can always feel like I’m helping to expand knowledge for everyone. I particularly like the specific work I’m involved in, because it allows me to bring together math, physics, and biology in exciting and interesting ways.
This figure shows several different ways of looking at recordings from a sleeping human brain. Different approaches allow us to see certain specific events more clearly.
