Join us for another insightful conversation on CASAT Conversations. This week, Dr. Russel Foster joins us to discuss the importance of sleep on mental health. We discuss why sleep is crucial and how you know if you are getting enough sleep. We discuss the catastrophic impacts of not getting enough sleep and the effects of shift work. He offers real-world examples and shares the latest research.
Dr. Russel Foster
Professor Russell Foster is the Head of Oxford’s Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology, the founder and Director of the Sleep and Circadian Research Institute and is a Fellow of Brasenose College Oxford. His research addresses how circadian rhythms and sleep are generated and regulated and what happens when these systems fail as a result of societal pressures, ageing and disease. A key finding has been his discovery and characterisation of an unrecognised light-detecting system within the eye that regulates circadian rhythms and sleep and, most recently, the translation of these findings to the clinic. For his work, Professor Foster was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2008, the Royal Society of Biology in 2011 and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2013. Russell was honoured by being appointed as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2015 for services to science. He has been a member of the Governing Council of the Royal Society and he established and led for six years the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee. He was the Chair of the Cheltenham Science Festival for six years and a Trustee of the Science Museum for eight years. He is currently a member of the scientific advisory board of the Eden Project. Professor Foster has published over 290 scientific papers and has received multiple national and international awards, including most recently the “Daylight Prize”. He has co-written four popular science books and his fifth with Penguin entitled Life Time was published in May 2022 and is a best-seller in both hard-and paperback.
