Marie Hayes
Contact
Professor Marie Hayes, Ph.D., is active Emeritus (2020) from the University of Maine, Biomedical Science and Engineering program and the department of Psychology, as well as allied scientist in Family Medicine and Psychiatry at Northern Light Healthcare. Dr. Hayes’ research program has been shared in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), SLEEP and many peer-reviewed publications focused on sleep and neurological diseases. She is founding member of the Maine Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience and 1st president. As a National Institute on Aging Principal Investigator, she is engaged in innovation to improve early diagnosis in early Alzheimer’s disease or Mild Cognitive Impairment, completing more than 100 home sleep studies since 2019. Her team applies artificial intelligence to sleep patterns of respiration and arousal to identify MCI risk in older adults from the community. Dr. Hayes’ will discuss challenges to sleep health with aging, and the importance of addressing sleep problems to retain and improve cognition as we age. Future work with aging communities aims to use home sleep assessment to improve early diagnosis, access new treatments, and to halt or reverse Alzheimer’s disease progression.
Honors
2007-2008 Trustee Professorship Award, University of Maine System
2010-2011 Research & Creative Achievement Award, UMaine College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
2010-2011 First president and founder, Society for Neuroscience, Maine Chapter
2011-present Editorial Board, Developmental Psychobiology
2014-2015 STEM Career Recognition Award, University of Maine. NSF ADVANCE
2018-2019 Faculty Excellence Award, UMaine Alumni Association
Other Experience and Professional Memberships
2005-present ad hoc reviewer, National Science Foundation
2009- Senior Mentor, Idea Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (PI P. Hand)
2009-present Scientific Advisory Board, Sarah Jane Brain Foundation
2011, 2020 PRAMS scientific review panel, Centers for Disease Control
2012 ad hoc reviewer, Child Psychopathology and Developmental Disabilities, Center for Scientific Review
(CSR)
2013 scientific review panel, Biobehavioral and Behavioral Processes (CSR)
2013, 2014, 2015 ad hoc reviewer, NIAAA, Neuroscience Study Section
2022 scientific review panel, Small Business: Neuropathology, Developmental Disability, and STEM Education (BBBP 12)
Professional Memberships:
Association of Professional Sleep Societies, Sleep Research Society, Research Society on Alcoholism, International Society for Developmental Psychobiology
Contributions to Science
Sleep movements as a biomarker of sleep disorder and neurological health. My interest in time series and computational solutions to the study of spontaneous events is related to EEG and sleep-wake state time series problems in my earlier research. Movements during sleep are reliable artifacts that are common and, when recording EEG, discarded in sleep data streams. Sleep movements have a long history in medicine where atypical movements are diagnostic of many sleep disorders, e.g. bruxism, periodic limb movements, REM behavior disorder. My research has explored sleep movements (SM) in patients with medical risk affecting the CNS. In the course of examining SM as an arousal event, it was suppressed (as are all arousals) during sleep
fragmentation and sleep deprivation. In the SleepMove device and software we have harnessed respiratory movements and confirm in patients that SM stimulate respiratory drive. SM-respiratory coupling is proposed as a potential mechanism for cognitive loss associated with MCI and other neurological diseases or brain injury. The latter conditions being more common in aging.
Marie Hayes, Ph.D.is co-founders of Activas Diagnostics, LLC which began in 2010 with our Phase I SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) award and principal investigators of an NIH Phase II SBIR award (2018-2021) to develop a new sleep device system to identify atypical patterns in early Alzheimer’s disease and Related Dementia (ADRD). Activas Diagnostics’ first product is an “under the sheets” mattress system that will innovate neurotechnology for home sleep monitoring. Our recent study of 100 aging persons with and without early AD in over 200 nights of sleep recording in the home determined AD risk based on arousal system irregularities detected in periodic microstructural movements impaired in AD. Using AI, we have identified a time signature of this process that can classify patients with early AD, or mild cognitive impairment. The marketing potential of our sleep device is supported by Activas’ NIH using AI algorithms and has been designated a de novo device system by the FDA with a developed regulatory path.
Patent Award
M. Hayes, and A. Abedi, “System and method for early detection of mild traumatic brain injury”, US Patent 13/106,451, Awarded June 2015, Amended April, 2019.
