Assistant Professor, Psychiatry & Human Behavior
School of Medicine

Affiliated faculty, Cognitive Sciences
School of Social Sciences

Affiliated faculty, Pathology
School of Medicine

Sleep, Sleep Deprivation, Sleep Disorders, Cognitive Aging, Alzheimer’s Disease, Memory, Neurodegeneration

Dr. Mander’s recent published work utilized a multimodal neuroimaging approach to quantitatively triangulate relationships between sleep quality, brain structure and function, Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology, and episodic and procedural memory in healthy older adults. Specifically, he has conducted targeted research that revealed that age-related decrements in quantitative measures of non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep oscillations, including slow waves and sleep spindles, contribute to memory decline in older age. These relationships are statistically mediated by the influence of these sleep oscillations on the functioning of the hippocampus in support of facilitating novel encoding and the long-term retention of episodic experiences and procedural skills.

Another critical focus of Dr. Mander’s work is to elucidate the mechanisms explaining why some older adults show more disrupted sleep than others. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques, he has shown that regionally-specific degeneration of white and grey matter in the brain predicts the topographically-specific disruption of NREM slow waves and sleep spindles in cognitively normal older adults. Using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, he has further shown that, in cognitively normal older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, the degree of accumulated Alzheimer’s disease pathology (e.g. ß-amyloid and tau pathology) disrupts quantitative properties of NREM sleep oscillations in a manner that appears distinct from that observed in normal aging. This is particularly important, because identifying preclinical biomarkers of increased Alzheimer’s disease risk will support targeted early interventions to prevent the emergence of Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, all of this work supports the emerging hypothesis that sleep disruption mechanistically contributes to the initial pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease and to the cognitive impairment associated with its progression.

Dr. Mander also has a programmatic focus on relationships between sleep physiology, cognition, mood, health, and brain development across childhood. Recent work in the lab shows that fitness is associated with local expression of brain oscillations during sleep, cognitive function, and mood in developing adolescents. Current studies are examining mechanistic links between these variables, and the impact of exercise on local sleep expression and cognitive and mental health outcomes.

Dr. Mander is currently involved in multiple collaborative projects both at University of California, Irvine and at other academic institutions around the world. These collaborations include longitudinal studies, in multiple distinct populations at increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, tracking relationships between changes in quantitative sleep measures, brain structure and function, cortical ß-amyloid and tau burden, cardiovascular health, and memory in healthy older adults. He is also involved in studies aimed at characterizing the clinical biomarker potential of quantitative sleep measures, as well as the efficacy of sleep interventions to boost cognition in older adults with Alzheimer's disease pathology. The ultimate goal of his research program is to characterize how and when sleep interacts with neurodegenerative pathology and medical disorders to impact dementia risk, and to determine if sleep interventions can effectively promote healthy cognitive aging in older adults with or at risk for neurodegenerative dementias.

Dr. Mander has received the Wayne A. Hening Sleep Medicine Investigator Award from the American Academy of Neurology, which emphasizes work revealing critical novel links between neurology and sleep medicine. He also received an award for Excellence in Research on Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders from the Northern California and Northern Nevada chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association.

Dr. Mander received his PhD in Neuroscience at Northwestern University, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. His research is concerned with characterizing the role of sleep in cognitive function and overall brain health across the human lifespan in both healthy populations and populations at risk for neurodegenerative disease.

Chappel-Farley, M.G., Mander, B.A., Nan, B., Grill, J.D., Yassa, M.A., Benca, R.M. Symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea are associated with less frequent exercise and worse subjective cognitive function across adulthood. Sleep 2021 Oct 4:zsab240. doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsab240. PMID: 34604910

Skelin, I., Zhang, H., Zheng, J., Ma, S., Mander B.A., Knight, R.T., McNaughton, B.L., Lin, J.J. Coupling between slow-waves and sharp-wave ripples engages distributed neural activity during sleep in humans. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2021 118(21) e2012075118; doi: 10.1073/pnas.2012075118. PMID: 34001599

Neikrug, A.B., Mander, B.A., Radom-Aizik, S., Chen, I.Y., Stehli, A., Lui, K.K., Chappel-Farley, M.G., Dave, A., Benca, R.M. Aerobic fitness and the sleeping brain of adolescents—a pilot study. Sleep Advances 2021, 2(1) zpab005; doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/sleepadvances/zpab005. PMID: 33981996

Dudysova, D., Janku, K., Smotek, M., Saifutdinova, E., Koprivova, J., Buskova, J., Mander, B.A., Brunovsky, M., Zach, P., Korcak, J., Andrashko, V., Viktorinova, M., Tyls, F., Bravermanova, A., Froese, T., Palenicek, T., Horacek, J. The effects of daytime psilocybin administration on sleep: implications for antidepressant action. Front Pharmacol 2020 11:602590; doi: 10.3389/fphar.2020.602590. PMID: 33343372

Mander, B.A. Local Sleep and Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiology. Front Neurosci 2020 14:525970; doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.525970. PMID: 33071726.

Winer, J.R., Mander, B.A., Kumar, S., Reed, M., Baker, S.L., Jagust, W.J., Walker, M.P. Sleep disturbance forecasts prospective ß-amyloid accumulation across subsequent years. Curr Biol 2020 30(21):4291-4298.e3; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.017. PMID: 32888482.

Lendner, J.D., Helfrich, R.F., Mander, B.A., Romundstad, L., Lin, J.J., Walker, M.P., Larsson, P.G., Knight, R.T. An electrophysiological marker of arousal live in humans. eLife 2020 9:e55092; doi: 10.7554/eLife.55092.

Chappel-Farley, M.G., Lui, K.K., Dave, A., Chen, I.Y., Mander, B.A. Candidate mechanisms linking insomnia disorder to Alzheimer’s disease risk. Curr Opin Behav Sci 2020 33:92-98 (in press; SI: Sleep and Cognition; doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.01.010).

Winer J.R., Mander B.A., Helfrich R.F., Maass A., Harrison T.M., Baker S.L., Knight R.T., Jagust W.J., Walker M.P. Sleep as a potential biomarker of tau and ß-amyloid burden in the human brain. J Neurosci 2019 17:0503-0519; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0503-19.2019. PMCID: 31209175

Zheng J., Stevenson R.F., Mander B.A., Mnatsakanyan L., Hsu F.P.K., Vadera S., Knight R.T., Yassa M.A., Lin J.J. Multiplexing of theta and alpha rhythms in the amygdala-hippocampal circuit supports pattern separation of emotional information. Neuron 2019 102(4)887-898. PMCID: 30979537

Relationships between local and global mechanisms of sleep apnea, Alzheimer's disease biomarkers, and memory impairment in cognitively asymptomatic older adults National Institute on Aging (Baltimore)2020-08-01 to 2025-04-30|Grant GRANT_NUMBER: K01AG068353 URL: https://app.dimensions.ai/details/grant/grant.9329401

Sleep Research Society

American College of Neuropsychopharmacology

International Society to Advance Alzheimer's Research and Treatment

World Sleep Society

Center for Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience

Fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

Faculty Member of the UCI Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6367

Last updated
11/16/2021