Rate My Professor Derk-Jan Dijk

Derk-Jan Dijk, PhD, FRSB, FMedSci, is Professor of Sleep and Physiology and a Distinguished Professor in the School of Biosciences within the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Surrey. He serves as Director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre, which he founded in 2003. With over 40 years of experience in clinical sleep research, Dijk earned his BSc and MSc cum laude in Biology and his PhD from the University of Groningen in 1988, focusing on the two-process model of sleep regulation. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Pharmacology, University of Zurich, before joining Harvard Medical School as Assistant Professor of Medicine and serving as Associate Neuroscientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. In 1999, he returned to Europe to take up his position at the University of Surrey.

Dijk's research specializations encompass the circadian and homeostatic regulation of sleep, interactions between sleep-wake history and circadian rhythms, mathematical modeling of sleep-wake cycles, sleep disturbances in aging and dementia including Alzheimer's disease, novel biomarkers for sleep debt and circadian phase such as blood-based mRNA and neuroimaging-derived myelin markers, and contactless sleep monitoring technologies including wearables, ear-EEG, and impulse radar. His work also addresses effects of sleep deprivation on transcriptome, metabolism, cognition, and vigilance, light interventions for circadian misalignment, and climate change impacts on sleep quality. Key publications include 'Stability, precision, and near-24-hour period of the human circadian pacemaker' (1999), 'Contribution of the circadian pacemaker and the sleep homeostat to sleep propensity, sleep structure, electroencephalographic slow waves, and sleep spindle activity in humans' (1995), 'Effects of insufficient sleep on circadian rhythmicity and expression amplitude of the human blood transcriptome' (2013), 'International recommendations for sleep and circadian research in aging and Alzheimer's disease: A Delphi consensus study' (2025), and 'Three Contactless Sleep Technologies Compared to Actigraphy and Polysomnography' (2023). Dijk has received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the Sleep Research Society Distinguished Scientist Award (2015), and fellowships from the Royal Society of Biology and Academy of Medical Sciences. His contributions, evidenced by over 58,000 citations, have profoundly influenced understanding of sleep physiology and its applications in health and disease.