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, and in particular, learning & 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 in memory. From this perspective, understanding how sleep shapes our memories gets at the very core of understanding who we are as thinking, knowing, conscious beings. A pretty compelling reason to do science! In my early work, I used concurrent scalp and intracranial EEG, coupled with tools from artificial intelligence and machine learning, to investigate how nested oscillations in the sleeping brain subserve "offline" learning and memory consolidation. Now, my work focuses on translating that understanding to (1) design Artificial Intelligence that "sleeps" to learn better, faster and more robustly, and to (2) manipulate or enhance human memory & glymphatic "brain maintenance" with closed-loop neural stimulation BCI (brain-computer interface) wearables during sleep. 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
• EP Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

Curricula Vitae

• Biosketch
• Resume

 
 
 

Selected peer-reviewed publications

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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

  11. 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