Thomas Neylan, MD

Dr. Neylan is a Professor, In Residence in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the Director of the Posttraumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) Clinic and the Stress and Health Research Program at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. His research has focused on the role of sleep in emotion regulation, cognitive function, and metabolic health, in patients with PTSD and in aging populations with neurodegenerative disorders. He has been a Principal Investigator on multiple funded projects sponsored by the National Institute of Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and several foundations.
His current funding includes projects focused on the role of sleep and circadian factors in risk and resilience for developing PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury in acutely traumatized patients seen in Emergency Departments, a human-animal translational study examining the role of maladaptive myelination as a mechanism underpinning the structural and functional brain abnormalities associated with PTSD, a second project examining maladaptive myelination in a postmortem sample of subjects with PTSD and controls together with matched samples of living subjects studied with MRI, two joint clinical and brain bank studies of sleep/wake regulation in neurodegenerative tauopathies, and a controlled trial of a selective glucocorticoid antagonist in PTSD.