Beneficial collaboration
As a consultant on sleep cognition at SRI International in Menlo Park, Kahan has nurtured an innovative collaboration with Ian Colrain, director of SRI’s Human Sleep Research Program. The SRI program has one of the world’s most advanced research-only sleep labs, and Kahan’s professional association there has benefited Santa Clara’s fledgling sleep lab in several important ways.
For example, Santa Clara student research assistants have visited Colrain’s lab, observing studies in progress and meeting sleep researchers. In addition, SRI researchers provided much-needed technical assistance by helping Kahan get her polysomnography system—the equipment that captures study participants’ sleep-pattern data—to work properly. “Different companies create the software and hardware involved,” Colrain explains. “Getting both to work properly together is always a challenge.”
SRI is realizing advantages as well. “It’s an active collaboration,” Colrain explains, “where she’s getting the benefit of training in our lab and learning all the stuff that we’re really good at, while we’re gaining the benefit of her different point of view and skills—which are proving quite useful to us.”
In addition, Colrain and his lab need experienced and well-trained people to manage a variety of sleep study projects. By working with students from local universities, such as Santa Clara and Stanford (where Colrain teaches), the SRI researchers hope to nurture a nearby pool of talent.
In fact, SRI has already hired one Santa Clara alumnus, Matt Freeland ’02, although he graduated before Kahan’s lab came together. Freeland joined SRI in mid-2005, helped by an enthusiastic recommendation from Kahan, his mentor and former SCU advisor. He is currently being trained to manage an upcoming study on smoking cessation and the quality of sleep.
A critical juncture
Santa Clara funded the start-up of Kahan’s sleep lab with grant money that came in part from the Montgomery Foundation. Two years later, with equipment installed and tuned, protocols and measures largely developed, and student research assistants trained, the lab is at last poised to begin contributing to science.
Kahan plans to work with students to investigate some interesting questions, such as the way attention, problem-solving skills, and self-awareness vary across the sleep/wake cycle. Another intended area of study that would be particularly relevant to students is the way sleep debt influences attention, mood, and performance (see sidebar).
Like all lab-based research, however, sleep research is expensive. To pay for it, Kahan is doing what research universities and graduate schools have to do all the time—applying for federal research grants.
It’s a very competitive arena. But odds are, Kahan will find funding somehow. She is, after all, a believer and an optimist—and, appropriately, a dreamer.
– Monte Lorenzet is a freelance science and technology writer based in Silicon Valley.