Student Profiles

Samika Kumar graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017 as a Regents' and Chancellor's Scholar with a degree in Cognitive Science. Her interest in sleep research began in high school when she interned at Dr. Seiji Nishino's lab at Stanford University to study the practicality of using the piezoelectric system to detect cataplexy-like behavior in mice. In her undergrad, she examined the effects of regional GABA on the auditory resting-state network at Dr. Fumiko Hoeft's lab at the University of California, San Francisco, and she studied how pharmacological manipulations of sleep influence mood regulation at Dr. Sophie Schwartz's lab at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. After graduation, Samika joined Dr. Matthew Walker's lab in Berkeley, where she explored the potential of transcranial electrical brain stimulation to enhance sleep quality.

In her doctoral work, Samika aims to investigate how daytime sleepiness affects cognitive functions in the brain, and she hopes to extend this work to clinical applications in the future.