PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Does the “Night-float rotation” alter sleep/wake cycles and circadian rhythms of UPR physician residents: Modulation by chronotypes.
Co-PI: Yohana De Jesús Berríos, MD
Co-PI: Annabell Segarra, PhD
My long-term career goal is to contribute to the understanding of how the multiple circadian oscillators throughout the body interact to regulate homeostasis, physiology, and brain states under healthy and disease conditions. As a graduate student at Brandeis University, I participated in the discovery that multiple circadian oscillators, rather than a single master oscillator, regulate circadian locomotor behavior in Drosophila. These findings were later confirmed in mammals and their transformative potential and significance were recognized by the scientific community in the form of the 2017 Nobel Prize to 3 main researchers including one of my Ph.D. Advisors Dr. Michael Rosbash. As a faculty member at the University of Puerto Rico, I have continued this line of research and expanded to other organisms such as the Honey Bee. We have discovered that honey bees have circadian chronotypes and that they use a natural form of shift work to organize their colony workload. How honey bees manage to do shift work without its negative consequences is currently one of our research priorities.
