Caroline Lustenberger
Curriculum Vitae
Caroline Lustenberger received her Bachelor’s (2007) and Master’s degree (2009) in Human Movement Sciences at the ETH Zurich. She then progressed to doing a PhD in Neuroscience under the supervision of Prof. Reto Huber at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich and ETH Zurich with a specific focus on sleep research (awarded in 2013). In 2014, she was awarded a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and moved to the US for a postdoc. In a leading non-invasive brain stimulation lab at UNC at Chapel Hill supervised by Professor Flavio Frohlich she developed and validated EEG closed-loop electrical and sensory stimulation systems to modulate sleep and behaviour. In 2017, Caroline moved back to Switzerland with a return postdoctoral fellowship grant awarded by SNSF to be part of the development of a portable EEG closed-loop system that uses auditory stimulation to enhance deep sleep. Using that system, she has initiated a first large-scale clinical trial to identify the potential of long-term stimulation to enhance sleep, brain and body health in elderly. This project has been conducted at ETH Zurich in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology under the mentorship of Professors Walter Karlen and Nicole Wenderoth. After obtaining a prestigious Ambizione career grant from the SNSF, Caroline has become a group leader at the Neural Control of Movement Lab in January 2019.
Research Interests
Sleep represents a fundamental restorative process and is essential for our health. With increasing age, sleep quality can be greatly reduced and thus restorative processes less pronounced suggesting it to be a prime target to promote healthy ageing. Yet, long-term sleep interventions that can boost recovery processes of brain and body to promote the health span are not established because scientific insights in the causal role of specific sleep processes in these recovery processes are missing. Caroline’s research targets this gap and aims at identifying the role of brain activity during sleep in recovery processes of brain and body. To do so, she merges cutting-edge, closed-loop auditory and electrical brain stimulation to modulate sleep brain activity with advanced body assessments (e.g. cardiovascular) to delineate the causal role of sleep in these body functions. Caroline combines in-lab, mechanistic studies with long-term, real-life experiments using new wearable devices. Her research might proof transformative for maintaining health up until old age and opens completely new opportunities for modulating regenerative processes across the body.
Publications
For a full list of publications please consult external pageGoogle Scholarcall_made.