Julio Fernandez-Mendoza, PhD

Dr. Julio Fernandez-Mendoza's research focuses on the relationship between disturbed, insufficient and misaligned sleep with cardiometabolic, neurocognitive and psychopathologic morbidity and mortality. He is examining these relationships in population-based cohorts of young children, adolescents and adults studied in the sleep lab and at home. His overarching goal is to better understand the maturational trajectories, natural course and associated health outcomes of normal and inadequate sleep and improve the phenotyping of its heterogeneous disorders, particularly insomnia and sleep apnea. His research relies on both subjective and objective methods and techniques such as standardized neurocognitive testing, polysomnography, spectral/FFT analysis, ambulatory actigraphy and inflammatory, stress, metabolic and sleep EEG biomarkers. His other research interests encompass testing the comparative effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral vs. pharmacological therapies for insomnia and its phenotypes.