We spend almost 1/3 of our life sleeping, and yet we know very little about this mysterious behavioral state. An answer to even the seemingly simplest question continues to elude us: Why do we get sleepy? In the last 20 years, many advances in our understanding of this topic have come from studies of an unlikely subject - the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In this talk, I will discuss some of the broad benefits of studying sleep in fruit flies and will share some of the projects from my lab in which we examine how sleep is regulated by internal and environmental factors.

Chris Vecsey, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Director of the Neuroscience Program at Skidmore College. He has been at Skidmore for 10 years, but before that was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brandeis University, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, and an undergraduate at Amherst College. His research examines the neurobiological mechanisms of sleep regulation in fruit flies, and he teaches courses on Neurophysiology, Mechanisms of Memory, and the Neurobiology of Sleep.