Will Coon, PhD
Sleep Scientist. A.I. Engineer. Data Aesthete.

About

SLEEP SCIENTIST. ECOG SPECIALIST. DATA AESTHETE.

 
 
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About

Will Coon-DeKuiper, PhD

We spend a third of our lives asleep. Why? Decades of work shows that one of the most important functions of sleep is to support our cognitive faculties—in particular, learning and memory. We “come online” every morning knowing who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going because of the experiences we have stored. Understanding how sleep shapes those memories gets at the very core of understanding who we are as thinking, conscious beings. A pretty compelling reason to do science!

As a neural systems engineer and neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), I get to tackle this mystery at the intersection of human electrophysiology, artificial intelligence, and wearable neurotechnology. In my early work, I used concurrent scalp and intracranial EEG to investigate how nested oscillations in the sleeping brain subserve "offline" learning. Today, I lead multidisciplinary teams of engineers, neuroscientists, and clinicians to build large-scale AI Foundation Models pretrained directly on vast amounts of human sleep data.

My current focus is translating that deep understanding into clinically deployable, real-time analytics for non-expert use. We are building systems that enable autonomous, physiology-grounded interpretation of brain states from low-burden, everyday sensors. Whether it is achieving domain-generalized transfer to wearable EEG for device-agnostic monitoring, designing AI that "sleeps" to learn more robustly, or exploring closed-loop BCI wearables to enhance human memory and glymphatic "brain maintenance," my goal is to decode and harness the power of the sleeping brain.

When I'm not buried in electrophysiology data, I also have a keen interest in data visualization and scientific art.

 

Education

Harvard Medical School
Research Training Program in Sleep, Circadian and Respiratory Neurobiology

State University of New York at Albany
Doctor of Philosophy

McGill University
Bachelor of Science

Memberships & Affiliations

• Sleep Research Society, Member
• American Academy of Sleep Medicine, Member
• IEEE, Member

• Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
• Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

Curricula Vitae

• Biosketch
• Resume

Open Source Projects

• ezscore‑f — Freely available, validated sleep stage classifiers for forehead EEG
• DCMini EEG Patch — Open‑source, low‑cost wearable EEG patch hardware

 

Selected peer-reviewed publications & preprints

  1. Coon, WG, & Ogg, M. (2026). “Sleep EEG foundation models reveal within-stage microstructure that improves health screening beyond traditional stages.” under review at npj Digital Medicine. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9044150/v1

  2. Coon, WG, & Ogg, M. (2025). "Foundation Models Reveal Untapped Health Information in Human Polysomnographic Sleep Data". medRxiv, 2025-07.2.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.07.15.25331562

  3. Coon WG, Zerr P, Milsap G, Sikder N, Smith M, Dresler M, Reid M. (2025) "ezscore-f: A Set of Freely Available, Validated Sleep Stage Classifiers for Forehead EEG." bioRxiv, 
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.02.657451   

  4. Ogg M., & Coon WG, (2025). "Transformer Models Enable Accurate Brain-Age Gap Biomarker Prediction from Sleep Physiology".  medRxiv, accepted 7 Aug 20254. 
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.07.25333233

  5. Coon WG, Luna D, Panagrahi A, Reid M, and Ogg M, (2025), “Getting more from less: Transfer learning improves sleep stage decoding accuracy in peripheral wearable devices,” arXiv, [Online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.007305. 

  6. Coon WG, Peranich P, Milsap G. (2025), “StARS DCM: A Sleep Stage-Decoding Forehead EEG Patch forReal-time Modulation of Sleep Physiology.” (2025) arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.03442, DOI:
    http://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.03442.6. 

  7. Ogg, M., Hingorani, R., Luna, D., Milsap, G. W., Coon, WG, & Scholl, C. A. (2025). EEG Foundation Models for BCI Learn Diverse Features of Electrophysiology. arXiv. 
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.01867

  8. Gupta S, Amyot F, Coon WG, Pollatou L, Skeiky L, Seenivasan S, Kenney K, Lee A, Lettieri M, Penafiel A, Yalewayker S, Cheraghpour E, Sheth P, Metzger E, Scholl C, and Werner K. (2025). "Tracking Sleep-Linked Brain Fluid Dynamics Using Modified fNIRS: A Novel Noninvasive Window into Glymphatic Function". DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.10.27.684357

  9. Robinson B.S., Lau C.W., New A., Nichols S.M., Johnson E.C., Wolmetz M., & Coon WG. Continual learning benefits from multiple sleep mechanism: NREM, REM, and Synaptic Downscaling. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2022, in press.
    arXiv:2209.05245

  10. Coon WG and Punjabi, N. Automatic sleep staging using a small-footprint sensor array and recurrent-convolutional neural networks. 10th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER), 2021, pp. 1144-1147. IEEE DOI: 9441432

  11. Coon WG, Valderrama M., Varela C., Amaya V., Stickgold R., Wilson M., Manoach D. S. Human sleep spindles coupled to hippocampal sharp-wave ripples have a characteristic EEG signature. SLEEP. 2019; 42 (supple_1) SLEEP DOI.

  12. Mylonas D, Tocci C, Coon WG, Baran B, Kohnke E, Zhu L, Vangel MG, Stickgold R, and Manoach DS. Naps reliably estimate nocturnal sleep spindle density in health and schizophrenia. Journal of Sleep Research (2019): e12968. PMID: 31860157

  13. Swift J, Coon W, Guger C, Brunner P, Bunch M, Lynch T, Frawley B, Ritaccio A, & Schalk G (2018). Passive Functional Mapping of Receptive Language Areas Using Electrocorticographic Signals. Clinical Neurophysiology. PMID: 30342252

  14. Schalk G, Marple J, Knight RT, & Coon W (2017). An Alternative to Power- and Phase-based Interpretation of Oscillatory Brain Activity. NeuroImage. 157(2017):545-554. PMID: 28624646

  15. Coon W & Schalk G (2016). A Method to Identify the Location and Onset of Task-Related Cortical Activity from Human Electrocorticographic Signals in Single Trials. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 271(2016):76-85. PMID: 27427301

  16. Coon W, Gunduz A, Brunner P, Ritaccio A, Pesaran B, & Schalk G. (2016). Oscillatory Activity Modulates the Timing of Neuronal Activations and Resulting Behavior. NeuroImage. 133(2016):294-301. PMID: 26975551

  17. Saletin JM, Coon W, & Carskadon MA (2016). Stage 2 Sleep EEG Sigma Activity and Motor Learning in Childhood ADHD: A Pilot Study. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology. June (2016). PMID: 27267670

  18. de Pesters A, Coon W, Brunner P, Gunduz A, Ritaccio A, de Weerd P, Roberts P, Brunet N, Oostenveld R, Fries P, & Schalk G (2016). Alpha Power Indexes Task-Related Networks on Large and Small Scales: Evidence from ECoG in a Multimodal Study in Humans and a non-Human Primate. NeuroImage. 134(2016):122-131. PMID: 27057960

  19. Liu Y*, Coon W*, de Pesters A, Brunner P, & Schalk G (2015). The Effects of Spatial Filtering and Artifacts on Electrocorticographic Signals. Journal of Neural Engineering. 12.5(2015):056008. PMID: 26268446