Division of Sleep Medicine @ Harvard Medical School

Trainee Profile

Daniel A. Cohen, MD, MMSc

Clinical Fellow in Neurology, Harvard Medical School
Research Fellow, Division of Sleep Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Staff Neurologist, Sleep/Behavioral Neurology, Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

See publications

Inter-office Mail Address

BWH Division of Sleep Medicine BLI, 438M

Society Memberships

American Neurological Association
American Academy of Sleep Medicine

Research Unit(s)

Circadian Group, Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham & Women’s Hospital

Research Interests

As a clinical neurologist specialized in Sleep Medicine as well as Behavioral Neurology, I am interested in the interface between sleep and cognition. My research has focused on skill enhancement between practice sessions, a form of procedural memory consolidation that has been termed “off-line learning.” We have recently demonstrated that distinct components of a skill, which are acquired in parallel, undergo consolidation separately. Specifically, for a visuomotor sequence, skill based on the spatial layout of targets was enhanced over a night of sleep, whereas skill based on a specific series of finger movements was enhanced over the waking day. Therefore, distinct neural networks preferentially undergo consolidation in different brain states, and I would like to explore the role of both sleep as well as circadian factors in this form of plasticity.

Mentor(s)

Charles A. Czeisler, PhD, MD; Elizabeth B. Klerman, MD, PhD

Selected Publications

Cohen DA, Pascual-Leone A, Press DZ, Robertson EM. Off-line learning of motor skill memory: a double dissociation of goal and movement.
Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2005 Dec 13;102(50):18237-41. Epub 2005 Dec 5. [PMID: 16330773]