Andrew W. Varga, MD, PhD, FAASM

Dr. Andrew W. Varga is the Associate Division Chief for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor with Tenure in the David M. Rapoport Sleep Research Laboratory in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He received his B.A. in biochemistry from Rice University followed by a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, where he studied cellular and molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and memory formation. He then completed an M.D. from New York Medical College, residency training in neurology at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a sleep medicine fellowship at NYU.

Dr. Varga has a longstanding interest in mechanisms of learning and memory, the role of sleep in cognition, and the effects of sleep disorders and sleep loss on cognitive function and risk for Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases. His active research programs span from animal models, investigating sleep disruption and augmentation on tau pathology, to human subjects, studying aging and sleep apnea effects on spatial memory and changes to the brain using neuroimaging techniques.

He has been named a Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellow, a Friedman Brain Institute Scholar, American Thoracic Society James B. Skatrud Scholar, and has received support from the National Institute on Aging, the American Sleep Medicine Foundation, the American Thoracic Society Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the philanthropy of James B. Kuhn.