Laura Lewis PhD

Laura Lewis is the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor in IMES and EECS at MIT, and an Associate Faculty Member at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from MIT and conducted postdoctoral research as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She is the recipient of the Society for Neuroscience Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award, the One Mind Rising Star Award, the 1907 Trailblazer Award, the Sloan Fellowship, the Searle Scholar Award, the McKnight Scholar Award, and the Pew Biomedical Scholar Award.

Lewis is developing new, comprehensive ways to map brain dynamics over time—particularly during sleep cycles. She and her team are interested in how deep brain circuits, such as those in the thalamus, regulate and modulate cortical and behavioral states. Her fast, high-resolution neuroimaging techniques can detect activity in these complex brain circuits. She employs computational and systems neuroscience approaches to study how large-scale brain networks shift between sleep and wake states, and how sleep deprivation leads to cognitive dysfunction. Lewis joined Boston University in 2019, after recent work as an investigator at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has received the Society for Neuroscience Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award and was selected as a Kavli fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.