Rebecca Spencer

PhD, 2002, Purdue University

Center for Research on Families

Center for Human Health & Performance

Institute for Applied Life Sciences

Neuroscience & Behavior Graduate Program

The Somneuro Lab studies sleep function and measurement across the lifespan. Specific areas of interest include relations between sleep and brain development and between age-related decline in brain health and sleep. This work has been funded continuously by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and industry partners. She has over 150 scholarly publications and her work has been featured by the New York Times, BBC, and in documentaries by PBS NOVA and Netflix. 

Dr. Rebecca Spencer graduated from the Purdue University Neuroscience graduate program, concentrating in neural control of movement. After graduating from Purdue with a PhD in neuroscience in 2002, she went to UC Berkeley where she was a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute until 2008. Her postdoctoral work on neural control of motor sequence learning was funded by an NIH NRSA. Subsequently, she was awarded an NIH Pathways to Independence Award (K99/R00) for studies on the age-related changes in sleep-dependent consolidation of motor learning. 

In 2008, Dr. Spencer joined the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2018. Dr. Spencer also serves as the Faculty Athletic Representative for UMass, a liaison between the academic and athletic areas of the campus.