Maxwell Shafer

Campus

St. George (downtown)

CSB Appointment

Full

Research Areas

Animal Biology, Bioinformatics / Computational Biology, Evolutionary Biology, Genetics / Genomics, Neurobiology

Education

Post-doc Harvard/University of Basel, 2023
Ph.D McGill University, 2016
MSc University of Western Ontario, 2011
HBSc University of Western Ontario, 2009

Graduate Programs

Cell and Systems Biology, Biochemistry

Research Description

Many of the biological mechanisms that regulate the circadian phase, duration, and structure of sleep are conserved across vertebrates. Given this extensive conservation, it is remarkable that sleep patterns display widespread variation both across and within species. Animals can have different chronotypes (‘early-birds’ and ‘night-owls’) or spend variable amounts of time asleep (from as little as 2hrs to 18hrs a day). Species can shift the phase of their circadian activity (nocturnal or diurnal), restrict activity to specific periods of the day (dawn or dusk), or lose rhythmicity entirely. However, we do not know the genes responsible for shifts in circadian activity or sleep structure, or comprehend the evolutionary causes or consequences for such changes. In our group we use a combination of bioinformatic and computational genomic comparisons across species, ancestral reconstructions of sleep across hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and behavioural, neurobiological, and molecular comparisons between focal species (diurnal and nocturnal species of fish).