Rate My Professor Penny Lewis

Professor Penelope Lewis is a Professor in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, leading the Neuroscience and Psychology of Sleep Lab (NaPS) within the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC). She earned her BA from Cornell University and DPhil from the University of Oxford. Her research centers on brain plasticity and off-line learning during sleep and wakefulness, examining changes in behaviour and neural activity occurring after initial learning, particularly when memories are not being actively encoded, practised, or recalled. Key areas of investigation include consolidation of procedural skills, processing of emotional episodes, transition of memories from episodic to semantic forms, and 'sleep engineering'—techniques to manipulate sleep oscillations for enhanced cognitive benefits and health improvements, such as strengthening memory, reducing negative emotions, and mitigating cognitive decline associated with ageing.

Lewis has obtained significant research funding, including an ERC Consolidator Grant for the SolutionSleep project on sleep's role in creativity via memory replay, a Wellcome Trust grant for Overnight Therapy targeting depression and PTSD through targeted memory reactivation, and an MRC Centre of Excellence award for Restorative Neural Dynamics on neural activity patterns and brain stimulation devices. Her publications encompass over 100 peer-reviewed articles, with notable works such as 'How memory replay in sleep boosts creative problem solving' (2018), 'Targeted memory reactivation in human REM sleep elicits detectable reactivation' (eLife, 2023), 'Cueing memory reactivation during NREM sleep engenders long-term plasticity in both brain and behaviour' (Imaging Neuroscience, 2024), and 'Sleep-related benefits to transitive inference are modulated by encoding strength and joint rank' (Learning & Memory, 2023). She authored the popular science book 'The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest' and edited the anthology 'Spindles: Stories from the Science of Sleep'. Lewis has presented a TEDx talk on sleep engineering, advancing the field through innovative applications of EEG, fMRI, and auditory stimulation during sleep.