Russell Foster | Your Body Clock and Its Essential Roles in Good Health and Sleep | Talks at Google

Award-winning scientist Russell Foster discusses his book "Life Time: Your Body Clock and Its Essential Roles in Good Health and Sleep," a fascinating journey through our circadian rhythms, sleep, and health, by a world-leading expert on circadian neuroscience. The routines of our modern lives—home working, night shifts, technology—are playing havoc with our body clocks, sleep patterns, and health. Packed with cutting edge science, Russell takes the reader on a journey through our days and nights, and explains how we can get back into rhythm and live healthier, sharper lives. In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of discoveries around the science of the body clock and our twenty-four-hour biological cycles. Sleep and daily rhythms emerge from our genetics, physiology, behavior, and the environment. Like most of our behaviors, they are not fixed. These rhythms are modified by our actions, how we interact with the environment, and how we progress from birth to old age. Cutting through long-standing myths, Russell empowers readers by providing concrete information and guidance that can be used to understand what makes the body clock “tick.” Get the book here: https://goo.gle/3Qr7IBt. Russell Foster is a Professor of Circadian Neuroscience, the Head of Oxford’s Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology, the founder and Director of the Sleep and Circadian Research Institute and is a Fellow of Brasenose College Oxford. His research addresses how circadian rhythms and sleep are generated and regulated and what happens when these systems fail as a result of societal pressures, aging and disease. A key finding has been his discovery and characterisation of an unrecognised light-detecting system within the eye that regulates circadian rhythms and sleep and, most recently, the translation of these findings to the clinic. For his work, Professor Foster was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2008, the Royal Society of Biology in 2011 and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2013. Russell was honored by being appointed as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2015 for services to Science. He has been a member of the Governing Council of the Royal Society and he established and led for six years the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee. He was the Chair of the Cheltenham Science Festival for six years and is currently a Trustee of the Science Museum. Professor Foster has published over 290 scientific papers and has received multiple national and international awards, including most recently the Daylight Prize. Moderated by Kaitlyn Venezia.