Harvard Catalyst Profiles

My research has been focused on evaluating the relationship among sleep/circadian physiology, cardiovascular function, and cognitive aging. I also have extensive experience in nonlinear biomedical signal processing as a biomedical engineer and computational physiologist. For example, one of my early contributions is the development of distribution entropy and several of its variants to assess physiological complexity based on short-length signals. The new algorithm considers an integrated feature in the fluctuation patterns of the signal, which overcomes an important limitation of prior methods in the needs of sufficiently long data and allows a reliable assessment of complexity from short recordings.

My research in the recent 8 years has contributed to the understanding of sleep and circadian disturbances as early-stage manifestations or risk factors of AD. For example, my research demonstrates simultaneous degradations in cognition and sleep/circadian rhythms with advanced age and clarifies a bidirectional relationship between cognitive decline and circadian degradation in older human participants. A highlight of my recent discoveries in this field is the link between altered daytime napping and risk for AD, which opens a new research avenue to understand behavioral rhythms or sleep behaviors in dementia etiology and to design potential interventional strategies through consolidating sleep behaviors or sleep hygiene for cognitive benefits.

My research in the last 3 years has also been expanded to the study of physical and cognitive resilience in the context of sex/gender and racial minorities as well as people living with chronic inflammation burdens, who show a disproportionately higher burden of age-related comorbidities.