Dr. Wu’s research examines sleep at the molecular, circuit, neurophysiological, and behavioral levels. His current work focuses on how circadian time organizes sleep and arousal and how neural circuits encode homeostatic drive. He will utilize Drosophila and multimodel imaging to determine whether the temporal coding mechanisms in Drosophila are conserved in the mammalian suprachiasmatic nucleus, a brain region involved in the regulation of circadian rhythms. He will also determine whether sleep-regulating molecular pathways in astrocytes are conserved. Finally, he will examine human disorders, including the genes implicated in familial sleepwalking. The goal of his work is to determine conserved mechanisms in sleep and to identify fundamental neurobiological principles governing sleep processes.