Dr Raffaele Sarnataro has been awarded a Fulford Junior Research Fellowship by Somerville College, and was formally welcomed by the College community on 1 October.
The Fulford Junior Research Fellowships provide the opportunity for outstanding early career researchers to benefit from association with a College. The fellows become members of the Somerville College SCR with full dining rights, have dedicated mentorships and other benefits.
Raffaele comments, ‘The Fulford JRFs are recruited throughout the four divisions of the University, and I am honoured to increase the representation of our department in the Somerville college and broadly, among the Oxford SCR ecosystem. I look forward to fruitful interactions with other fellows and the wider college community, in the long-standing progressive spirit of Somerville. My research field, neuroscience, is particularly suitable to the interdisciplinary exchanges that collegiate life inspires’.
Raffaele’s research aims at identifying the mechanisms by which sleep is controlled, with the goal of revealing general blueprints underlying the essential, universal, yet mysterious function of sleep. In particular, his work has been elucidating how mitochondrial shape and function can regulate sleep need, suggesting a metabolic origin for sleep control, and how this drive is represented in the oscillatory neuronal activity. Read more about his research here.