Marishka BrownNobel Conference 60
Marishka Brown
Director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research
The National Sleep Agenda
Healthful sleep matters. The duration, efficiency, timing, regularity, and quality of sleep all contribute to our overall health as individuals, and as a society. Disparities in sleep health–as when a segment of our society is consistently disadvantaged in one or more of these dimensions and experiences adverse effects as a result–are public health issues. Shift work, poverty, social isolation, and job stress can all contribute to reducing the quality of sleep for entire populations.
In 2020, the National Institutes of Health, under the leadership of Marishka Brown, launched the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR) to support scholarly work on sleep that can have a positive impact on health and safety outcomes for our nation as a whole. Advancing the science of sleep and its significance as a public health issue is central to Brown’s role as Director of the NCSDR. Brown supports initiatives that integrate a variety of research approaches and study designs that lead to a better understanding of the things that cause disparities in the quality of sleep that different populations experience. One aim of this research is to inform and support the development of culturally appropriate interventions--strategies and tools that can reduce these sleep health disparities.
Marishka Brown also serves as chair of the sleep health objectives working group for Healthy People 2030, an initiative of the federal Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Among other goals, Healthy People 2030 aims to improve health, productivity, well-being, quality of life, and safety by helping people get enough sleep, by addressing obstacles such as access to healthcare, access to education, economic stability and environmental and social circumstances.
As a researcher and leader, Brown has significantly advanced issues at the intersection of sleep, women’s health, and lung disease. Brown played a key role in organizing the 2018 Research Conference on Sleep and the Health of Women, which underscored the critical need for understanding how sleep deficiency and disorders impact women’s health, noting the prevalence of sleep-related issues and their linkage to conditions such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and depression.
Brown also conducted a comprehensive overview of the intersection of women’s health, lung health, and disease. In exploring the intersection of women’s health, lung health, and disease, her contributions draw attention to the biological and environmental bases of sex/gender differences in lung health and disease, emphasizing how factors like prenatal exposures and sex hormones influence lung development and susceptibility to diseases like asthma, COPD, and pulmonary arterial hypertension–conditions that disproportionately affect women. Her work calls for the inclusion of adequate numbers of women in clinical research, the development of gender-focused studies, and a more profound exploration of how diseases uniquely affect women.
As the Director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, Brown plays a pivotal role in advancing the field of sleep medicine and chronobiology. With her focus being on partnership building, she drives collaboration among public stakeholders, federal agencies, professional associations to propel the developments that enhance public health. Dr. Brown has pioneered programs to investigate the links between circadian biology and heart, lung, and blood disorders. She leverages her expertise in pharmaceutical sciences and her postdoctoral research on age-related changes to drive impactful research that transforms our understanding of sleep disorders and their implications for overall health and wellbeing.
Marishka Brown is Director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, National Institutes of Health.