Dr. Drummond is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at University of California, San Diego and the Director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program and Cognitive Behavioral Interventions Program in the VA San Diego Healthcare System.  He has been involved in sleep research since 1991 when he was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona.  Dr. Drummond’s main program of research seeks to understand the impact of sleep and sleep deprivation on cognitive performance, brain function, as well as overall clinical symptoms and quality of life. He conducts both experimental studies and clinical studies.

Typically, his experimental studies manipulate sleep deprivation in healthy adults and measure the consequent cognitive and cerebral changes through behavioral and cognitive testing, functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), and EEG.  In addition to experimental studies in young healthy normal control subjects, his work also includes healthy older adults and clinical populations such as obstructive sleep apnea and insomnia. He is interested in a number of cognitive performance domains, particularly learning and memory, executive function, attention, and decision making.  The overall goals of this line of work are to: 1) better understand the impact of sleep and sleep loss on cognition; 2) predict individual vulnerability and resiliency to sleep loss; and 3) design interventions to mitigate against the negative effects when sleep deprivation is unavoidable. A second area of research interest is in the interaction between sleep and substance use/abuse. In the past, this has included sleep patterns during recovery from alcohol dependence. More recently, he has examined a) the effects of medicinal cannabis on sleep in patients with HIV-related neuropathy; and b) the effects of abstinence from cannabis on sleep in adolescent cannabis abusers. 
A third major area of research interest examines empirically validated treatments for the insomnia and nightmares, particularly in PTSD patients. One current study examines the added benefit of providing targeted treatment for nightmares and insomnia on top of more standard treatment for the daytime symptoms of PTSD.

Ben McKenna is a 5th year graduate student in the
neuropsychology track of the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in
Clinical Psychology. He has been involved in sleep research since 2004 when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona working in the Sleep Research Laboratory with Dr. Richard Bootzin.
Since joining the Laboratory for Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience in 2005, Ben has become interested in the intersection between clinical neuropsychology and sleep. Clinically, Ben is interested in diagnosing and treating changes in brain-behavior relationships following various insults to the brain (e.g., progressive neurological disorders, strokes, traumatic brain injury). His research interests involve using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to elucidate the neural basis of cognition and how sleep influences cognitive processes (e.g., memory consolidation) in both healthy individuals and brain-damaged patients.

His dissertation aims to better understand working memory by examining the neural underpinnings for components of verbal working memory (e.g., attention and rehearsal span) using fMRI. Additionally, this project aims to understand how total sleep deprivation differentially changes the activation underlying performance for these components.

 

 

Henry J. Orff, PhD 

Dr. Orff received his B.A. in Health & Society and his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Rochester (NY). After completing his undergraduate education, Dr. Orff worked as lead research coordinator at the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory under the mentorship of Drs. Donna Giles and Michael Perlis. In this capacity he helped oversee studies investigating the neurophysiology of insomnia (as measured with EEG) and its relationship to psychiatric functioning (e.g., major depressive disorder). During this time he also received his M.A. in Psychology from the SUNY College at Brockport.

In 2003, Dr. Orff matriculated in the San Diego State University and University of California San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, where he was mentored by Dr. Sean Drummond. His dissertation examined the effects of sleep loss in patients with chronic insomnia on daytime cognitive functioning (as measured with FMRI). Dr. Orff also completed his clinical internship training at Brown University Medical School.

At the current time Dr. Orff is pursuing his post-doctoral training at UCSD. He is currently involved with two research groups, the first investigating the role that circadian and hormonal function play in the development of mood and sleep problems in adult women (Women's Mood Disorders Laboratory, supervisor - Dr. Barbara Parry); the second studying the neurophysiological functioning and sleep disturbance in Veterans who have experienced traumatic brain injury (INTRuST Consortium, supervisors - Dr. Amy Jak and Dr. Elizabeth Twamley).

Dr. Orff has an ongoing interest in the effects of sleep loss resulting from insomnia on daytime and neurocognitive functioning. His hope is to continue to examine these issues in expanded populations (e.g., patients with TBI) with a goal of developing a program of research utilizing combined EEG and neuroimaging to study the effects of sleep loss on neurophysiological and treatment outcome measures.