Professor Vladyslav Vyazovskiy
Tutorial Fellow in Medicine & Fellow for Welfare
Professor of Sleep Physiology
Vladyslav Vyazovskiy graduated from Kharkiv National University, Ukraine, in 1997, and in 2004 he received his PhD degree at the University of Zurich. Following postdoctoral and lecturership positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Surrey University, he joined the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG) at the University of Oxford in 2013 as a Senior Research Fellow, before becoming Associate Professor of Neuroscience in 2015 and Professor of Sleep Physiology in 2021. Since 2020, he is a Tutorial Fellow in Medicine at Hertford College, and is a member of Sir Jules Thorn Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi) and Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery. Vladyslav Vyazovskiy is a Vice-President of the European Sleep Research Society and a Director of Graduate Studies at DPAG. His research interests include neurobiology of sleep and torpor, behaviour, neuropharmacology and mechanisms of brain oscillations during waking and sleep.
Undergraduate teaching
Vlad tutors first and second-year students at Hertford, covering Physiology & Pharmacology and Neuroscience. He also teaches an Option he developed on “Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience” for Biomedical Sciences Year 2 (FHS Part I) students.
Graduate teaching
Vlad is the Director of Graduate Studies at DPAG. He is a co-organiser of the Module “Genes, circuits and behaviour” for the Wellcome Trust Doctoral Training Programme in Neuroscience, and leads a Module on “Physiological Basis of Sleep” for the Online MSc Programme in Sleep Medicine since it was established in 2016. He is currently a primary supervisor for six DPhil students.
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Research interests
The main topic of Vlad’s research is sleep at various levels of organisation, including its circadian regulation, neurophysiologic, molecular and cellular mechanisms, and the links between sleep and metabolism, sensory functions and behaviour. We spend about 1/3 of our life asleep and we still do not know why. The predominant idea that sleep plays a restorative role fits well with our subjective experience. However, it is still unknown what needs to be restored, where in the brain or in the body the restorative changes must take place, and why global behavioural shutdown is necessary for sleep to provide its benefits. Although consequences of insufficient or disrupted sleep have major societal and economic implications, the importance of sleep is often underappreciated. Sleep is a vital necessity for health and wellbeing, and insufficient or disrupted sleep has been linked to a broad range of disorders. On the other hand, many diseases lead to sleep disturbances in some form. Vlad’s laboratory uses a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches and methods – from rodent/transgenic models and circadian phenotyping to pharmacology, electrophysiology, signal analyses and mathematical modelling.
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Related websites
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Publications
For publications list please visit Vlad’s web page:
https://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/team/vladyslav-vyazovskiy
See also:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-animals-learned-to-hibernate-and-why-we-cant-do-it-yet
https://aeon.co/essays/two-billion-humans-are-doing-something-bizarre-right-now-sleeping