Matthew Walker (scientist)

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.[6][7]

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

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 (MRI, PET scanning), 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.[8]

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.[9] Walker left in July 2017 when Hello shut down.[10]

Since October 2017, Walker has been working as a sleep scientist at Google Life Sciences (Verily), a research organization of Alphabet Inc. devoted to the study of life sciences.[11] Here, Walker helps the scientific exploration of sleep in health and disease.

In October 2017, Penguin Random House and Scribner published Walker's first book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams ISBN 978-0-241-26906-0.[12][13][14][15][16][17] He spent four years writing the book,[18] in which he asserts that sleep deprivation is linked to numerous fatal diseases, including dementia.[19] The book became an International Bestseller, including a #1 Sunday Times Bestseller in the UK,[20] and a New York Times Bestseller.[21]

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 [22], and by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, who in his article called Walker's purported removal of a bar from a graph a "smoking gun," commenting that it entered "research misconduct" territory.[23] Walker has responded to criticisms of the book in an essay[24].

Walker has received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.[25]

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.[26]