Matthew Walker (scientist)


Matthew Paul Walker is a British scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the impact of sleep on human health and disease. Previously, he was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has received funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He has published more than 100 scientific research studies and has been featured on television and radio outlets, including 60 Minutes, Amanpour & Company, National Geographic, NOVA scienceNOW, The Joe Rogan Experience, NPR and the BBC.

Early life and education

Walker was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom. He spent his early life in Liverpool and Chester. Walker graduated with a degree in neuroscience from University of Nottingham in 1996. He received a Ph.D. in neurophysiology from Newcastle University in 1999, where his research was funded by the Medical Research Council Neurochemical Pathology Unit.

Career and research

Harvard University

In June 2004, Walker became a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In one experiment he conducted in October 2002, he trained people to type a complex series of keys on a computer keyboard as quickly as possible. One group started in the morning and the other started in the evening, with a 12-hour time interval for each group respectively. He and his colleagues found that those who were tested in the evening first and re-tested after getting a good night's sleep improved their performance significantly without a loss of accuracy compared to their counterparts.

Berkeley

Walker left Harvard in July 2007 and since then has taught as a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Center for Human Sleep Science

Walker is the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, which is located in UC Berkeley's department of psychology, in association with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center. The organization uses brain imaging methods, high-density sleep electroencephalography recordings, genomics, proteomics, autonomic physiology, brain stimulation, and cognitive testing to investigate the role of sleep in human health and disease. It researches Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, cancer, depression, anxiety, insomnia, cardiovascular disease, drug abuse, obesity, and diabetes.

Hello

In August 2016, Walker began working with Hello, a consumer electronics company that made a sleep tracking device called Sense. He was hired as their chief scientific officer to analyze and improve people's sleeping habits based on the data they aggregated. Walker left in July 2017 when Hello shut down.

Verily / Google

In 2018, Walker collaborated with research scientists at Project Baseline in developing a sleep diary. Project Baseline is led by Verily, which until 2015 used to be called "Google Life Sciences". As of July 2020, Walker states on his website that he is "currently a Sleep Scientist at Google the scientific exploration of sleep in health and disease."

''Why We Sleep''

In October 2017, Penguin Random House and Scribner published Walker's first book, . He spent four years writing the book, in which he asserts that sleep deprivation is linked to numerous fatal diseases, including dementia. The book became a #1 Sunday Times Bestseller in the UK, and a New York Times Bestseller in the US.

Criticism

Why We Sleep has drawn criticism from Alexey Guzey, an independent researcher with a background in economics, in an essay entitled Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors. Walker responded to criticisms of the book in an essay. Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, called Walker's purported removal of a bar from a graph a "smoking gun," commenting that it entered "research misconduct" territory.

Awards and honours

Walker has received funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Around 2006, he was a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.

TED talk

Walker gave one of the main-stage talks at the TED conference in Vancouver in 2019. The talk was entitled, "Sleep is Your Superpower", and received over 1 million views within the first 72-hours of being online.

Controversies

Claims in Walker's book and TED talk have been questioned by several independent scientists, including the World Health Organization, which never declared a sleep loss epidemic.