Karen Spruyt

Professor Karen Spruyt, PhD, HDR, National Institute of Medicine and Health (INSERM) – NeuroDiderot, Université de Paris (France), earned her degree in child, adolescent, and adult clinical psychology in Belgium. Her passion for brain development resulted in an additional master degree in child neuropsychology (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and alongside another master degree in biostatistics (Leuven, Belgium).

She was awarded the doctoral degree and professorship in Brussels (Belgium), based on her work “Pediatric Sleep Problems: a contribution to their identification and relationship with daytime behavior”. While teaching developmental neuropsychology, she started her research career at the University of Louisville and the University of Chicago (United States). She has been a visiting/affiliated professor at the Monash Institute of Medical Research and the Ritchie Center for Baby Health Research (Australia), the University of British Columbia (Canada), the JiaoTong University of Shanghai (China) and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil).

Dr. Spruyt’s expertise in teaching psychology, its subdisciplines and statistics, has allowed her to interact with multidisciplinary research teams across the world, and to perform translational research in her domains of interest: developmental neuropsychology and somnopathology. Her research has been featured in many international publications, governmental discussions and on TV/radio programs. She has published more than 130 papers in SCI journals, three books and has been invited to give lectures at international sleep conferences in many countries around the world.