6 Women in Neuroscience Who Shaped the World of Sleep Science
March 8th is International Women’s Day!
To celebrate, we’re casting the spotlight on women in neuroscience who’ve shaped our understanding of sleep science as we know it.
① Dr. Maria Manasseina
Dr. Maria Manasseina (1841-1903) received her Doctorate in Medicine in the 1860s, making her one of the first women to do so in both Russia and Europe. A pioneer in somnology (sleep science), biochemistry, and physiological chemistry — Manasseina’s foundational research challenged the prevailing belief that sleep was a passive state, proving insomnia was deeply damaging and that sleep is essential to long-term health.
Her cornerstone study in the 1870s found that 'permanent insomnia' was fatal after just 4-5 days in canine subjects — even more damaging than 20-25 days of starvation. Long-term sleep deprivation lead to a 4-6° C drop in body temperature, reduced red blood cells, and prompted local brain hemorrhages.1
In 1889, she penned a first-of-its-kind handbook on sleep called Sleep: Its Physiology, Pathology, Hygiene, and Psychology. Hers was the first to link sleep with medical problems and examine how insomnia damages the brain and body.1
② Dr. Rosalind Cartwright (PhD)
Dr. Rosalind Cartwright (1922–2021) spent over half a century reshaping how we understand the sleeping mind — work so transformative she was nicknamed the "Queen of Dreams" by her peers.
Cartwright’s research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a remarkable 20+ years, ultimately earning her the distinction as the first woman to receive the Sleep Research Society’s Distinguished Scientist award in 2002.
Here are just a few of her career highlights: 2
- Founded the first accredited Sleep Disorders and Research Center in Illinois, in 1977.
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Proved body position was key to diagnosis + treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). She invented the "tennis ball t-shirt" (a shirt with a tennis ball sewn in) to prevent patients from rolling onto their backs while asleep.
- Found that depressed brains showed heightened activity during REM, suggesting the sleeping brain works overtime to manage emotions it didn't resolve during waking hours.
- Conducted a 5-month study that found dreaming during REM sleep was key to emotional processing, linking it with our ability to cope with stress.
- From her book, The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: "…sleep is a built-in physician and dreams an internal psychotherapist; that good sleep rests and restores our weary bodies and that good dreams temper our emotional responses to new experiences."
③ Dr. Minjee Kim (MD)
A neurologist and associate professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, Dr. Kim has dedicated her career to unpacking how sleep disruptions impact cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease. In a recent study of 300+ middle-aged adults, Dr. Kim found poor sleep was significantly linked with cognitive impairment.3
Another key area of exploration: how light affects sleep health. Dr. Kim found even something as small as sleeping with lights on is linked to obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.4
She’s gone further to reveal that, during pregnancy, light exposure before bedtime is linked with a higher risk of gestational diabetes. During and after pregnancy, she found that persistently short sleep was linked with increased metabolic syndrome (e.g., high blood pressure, high blood sugar, reduced “good” cholesterol).5, 6
④ Dr. Mary A Carskadon (PhD)
Dr. Mary Carskadon is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University who has spent over four decades as one of the world's leading experts on sleep in adolescents. Her research proved what many parents felt intuitively: teenagers aren't lazy. Their biology is working against them.
She co-developed the Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT), which still stands as the gold standard for clinically measuring daytime sleepiness. Her findings: during puberty, the circadian clock shifts by roughly two hours, making it nearly impossible for most teens to fall asleep early. Additionally, teens starting school at 7:20am were falling asleep at rates comparable to narcolepsy patients.7
As Carskadon put it: "The students may be in school, but their brains are at home on their pillows." 8
Her work directly fueled the movement to delay school start times, now endorsed by the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics.
⑤ Dr. Chiara Cirelli (MD, PhD)
Dr. Chiara Cirelli is a neuroscientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she co-developed one of the most influential theories in modern sleep science: the Synaptic Homeostasis Hypothesis (SHY).
Her theory explains why sleep is essential for our daily energy and ability to learn: throughout the day, as we learn and experience new things, our brain's neural connections grow stronger and more demanding — until they're so overloaded they can't effectively absorb new information.
Sleep, Cirelli and colleague Giulio Tononi proposed, is when the brain does its essential maintenance: resetting its bandwidth so we wake up ready to learn.9
⑥ Dr. Chandra L. Jackson (PhD, MS)
A senior epidemiologist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIH), Dr. Jackson has spent her career documenting an under-explored area of sleep research: the intersection of environmental and social factors on sleep health.
In a large-scale study of over 226,000 U.S. adults, Jackson and co-author Dr. Dayna Johnson found that black Americans slept worse than white Americans even within the same housing type. This was after accounting for income, education, and health status, suggesting a different societal force at play. 10
Dr. Chandra’s 2015 review further established that sleep deprivation may be a fundamental and chronically overlooked driver of racial disparities in cardiovascular disease. 11
Her work reframes poor sleep not as a personal failure, but as a measurable consequence of structural racism — and makes the case that you cannot solve a public health crisis without addressing its root cause.
To the women who helped the world sleep better
In a world that often overlooks the contributions of women in STEM, we feel it's just as important to give credit where credit's due. So in honor of International Women’s Day, here’s to just a few of the many brilliant women in neuroscience who’ve helped shape the world of sleep science as we know it today!
