Franken Paul

Biography

 Paul Franken received his PhD from the University of Groningen,The Netherlands, in 1993 for his work on sleep homeostasis and thermoregulation at the University of Zurich under the direction of Alexander A. Borbély. He was a postdoctoral fellow with H. Craig Heller at Stanford University, USA, where he studied the cellular mechanisms underlying circadian clock resetting.

Research Interest

 In the study of sleep two main regulatory processes have to be considered: a homeostatic process that is activated by and counters the effects of sleep loss and a circadian process that determines the time–of–day sleep preferably occurs. The fine–tuned interaction between the two permits us to stay awake and alert throughout the day and to remain asleep at night. To gain inside into the molecular correlates of the homeostatic process and its interaction with the circadian process we apply a combination of forward, molecular, and reverse genetic approaches in the mouse.