Girardin Jean-Louis
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Girardin Jean-Louis | |
|---|---|
 Jean-Louis in 2020 | |
| Alma mater | City University of New York |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | The effects of melatonin on sleep and cognition in cognitively impaired elderly individuals : a chronobiological perspective (1997) |
Girardin Jean-Louis is an American academic who is a professor in the department of population health and psychiatry at New York University. He is director of the Translational Sleep and Circadian Sciences Program and the "Program to Increase Diversity among Individuals Engaged in Health-Related Research" (PRIDE) Institute. In 2020, he was named as one of the Community of Scholars' most inspiring Black scientists in America.
Jean-Louis grew up in Haiti.[1] He became interested in engineering as a child, and particularly enjoyed building different contraptions.[1] At the age of seventeen he immigrated to New York City, where he joined the City College of New York as an undergraduate student in engineering.[1] As a student he took an elective course in sleep lab techniques, and became interested in sleep and wakefulness.[1] He earned his doctoral degree at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His doctoral research considered the impact of melatonin on sleep and cognition in elderly individuals.[2] He was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California, San Diego, where he specialized in sleep and chronobiology.[1]
As part of his research, Jean-Louis advanced the science around wearable technologies (actigraphy) to monitor patient's sleep-wake behavior out of hospital and expensive laboratories.[1][3] In the early days of his research on sleep science, Jean-Louis struggled to find academic mentors, particularly mentors of color. He continued to improve the science of actigraphy such that it could be more readily used to collect sleep data in the comfort and safety of patient's own home.[3]
