Prof Siobhan Banks

Brief description

Research Professor

Full description

Dr Siobhan Banks is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Sleep Research. After receiving her Ph.D. in 2004 from Flinders University of South Australia, she trained at the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue her research interests in the neurobehavioral consequences of sleep loss. Initially a postdoctoral researcher, supervised by Professor David Dinges, she joined the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine faculty as an Assistant Professor of Sleep in Psychiatry in 2006. While in the US Siobhan was a co-investigator on several grants primarily focused on the effects of sleep loss on performance and health. Additionally, she was an investigator on two National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NASA) funded projects, one aimed at determining optimal sleep-wake schedules with restricted sleep and recovery sleep opportunities, and the other investigating unobtrusive ways to measure performance stress using optical computer recognition algorithms applied to video of facial features. In 2009 Siobhan moved back to Australia with a research fellowship from the University of South Australia to continue her studies into the effects of sleep loss on health and neurobehavioral performance.