Sukru Demiral, Ph.D.

After conducting cognitive modeling research as a pre-doctoral fellow at CMU, Baris received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig, Faculty of Biosciences, Pharmacy and Psychology, Germany, through a joint project in Max Planck Institute Cognitive and Brain Sciences on neurolinguistics using EEG. After his PhD degree, he conducted a set of studies on visual perception at the University of Edinburgh using eye-tracking and EEG, and then later studied heritability of brain EEG dynamics in reward/punishment networks in the WUSTL. For a brief amount of time at NIH, he investigated how brain is engaged in narratives and fictional stories by using simultaneous EEG-fMRI method. He gradually developed interest in motivation, neurotransmitter dynamics, sleep, and addiction – particularly strengthened by the situation occurred from the current opioid crisis. He joined LNI in early 2016 as a post-doc, where he explored the effects of arousal, sleep, and sleep deprivation on neural dynamics, glymphatic system, brain metabolism, and health via multi-modal imaging including fMRI, PET, multiple peripheral devices, and simultaneous EEG-fMRI technique. Currently, as a staff scientist, he is conducting research on arousal systems, their relationship with blink/pupil dynamics, dopaminergic networks, and their influence on the central and peripheral nervous systems in AUD, OUD and healthy controls.