Everyone sleeps.  

Sleep, and how it relates to your health, is what ARCS Scholar alum Noah Milman studies in the lab of Dr. Miranda Lim, in the Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience program at OHSU.   

His research, using rodent species, focuses on the relationship between early life, sleep and autism or social behavior, and development and early life sleep in all mammals.  

“In humans, babies sleep more than anyone else,” Milman says. “So there must be a function of why babies are sleeping so much, plus the observation that babies who sleep less are more likely to have autism, and children with autism are more likely to have sleep problems.”   

“The first one and two years of life have got to be critical for the development of so many behaviors.”   

Looking at social interactions intrigues him as a scientist, he says, and “social behavior begins at the youngest phase of life.”   

He was earlier intrigued by the connection between sleep and dementia. Dr. Lim’s research focuses on sleep in later life, using human, mice, and vole models. “She has this unique perspective on sleep across the lifespan.”   

His research uses rodents to explore connections between sleep and stress, based on rodent behavior. Rodents who are “incredibly hyperactive, moving very fast, it’s a sign of anxiety.” The research also looks at rodent levels of corticosterone, which can indicate stress, like looking at cortisol levels in humans.   

In his 4th year of his PhD program, Milman recently received a National Institute of Mental Health Fellowship, giving him three more years of funding. The funding has already been received to fund this objective:  

Public Health Relevance Statement  
Project Narrative: Early life sleep lays the foundation for the neural circuitry that facilitates affiliative behavior. This work will investigate how early life sleep disruption impacts the developmental trajectory of inhibition in brain regions involved in the display of affiliative behavior in the highly social prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster). Finally, we directly probe a mechanism by testing whether an enriched sensory environment rescues impairments in circuit development and affiliative behavior induced by early life sleep disruption.  

 Milman hopes to wrap up his dissertation work in the next 18 months.   

He credits Dr. Lim and a lab staff scientist for teaching him the grant writing process, the receiving grant dollars process, budgeting at the lab level – “exposing me to what it’s like to run a lab,” Milman says.   

Milman has been busy outside the lab, teaching short-term classes at Portland State University and Lewis & Clark College. He’s also been to several conferences on sleep research.   

Milman’s bottom line advice on sleep: “A straightforward answer regarding the importance of sleep is regularity.”    

Noah’s ARCS Scholar Award was given by Barbara and Philip Silver.