Fiona C. Baker
Director of Center for Health Sciences and Human Sleep Research Program, Biosciences Division
Fiona Baker, Ph.D. is the Director of the Human Sleep Research Program at SRI International, which she joined in 2005. She focuses on understanding the interplay between sleep physiology and human health across the lifespan. Baker is a world expert on issues of sleep in women. Her areas of research include sleep EEG, sex differences in sleep, sleep in menopause, relationships between sleep and cardiovascular functioning, and interactions between brain development, sleep, and behaviors such as alcohol use, across adolescence.
Baker has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, and is currently PI on two consortium projects about adolescent development: The National Consortium on Alcohol and NeuroDevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (ABCD). She has published extensively on issues of sleep in women in the context of reproductive stages; her research has advanced understanding of insomnia that develops during the menopausal transition, and revealed interactions between the female reproductive system and sleep and circadian regulatory systems.
Baker also holds an appointment as Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in the Brain Function Research Group, School of Physiology, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Baker has published more than 80 scientific papers and has a Ph.D. degree in physiology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
View Baker’s publications on Research Gate and Google Scholar.
Recent publications
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Associations between mesolimbic connectivity, and alcohol use from adolescence to adulthood
We examined the associations between alcohol use and ventral tegmental area resting-state functional connectivity to subcortical structures in 796 participants across 9 waves of longitudinal data from the National Consortium…
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Resting-state fMRI activation is associated with phenotypic features of autism in early adolescence
In this study, we aimed to explore if activation in brain regions of the default mode network (DMN), specifically the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), superior temporal…
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Menstruation Problems and Sleep Interactions: Implications for the Mental Health of Adolescent Females
Internalizing symptoms are associated with menstrual cycle characteristics and menstrual pain in female adolescents, especially in those with shorter sleep and later bedtimes. The relationship between the menstrual cycle, sleep,…
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Menstrual Cycle Variations in Wearable-Detected Finger Temperature and Heart Rate, But Not in Sleep Metrics, in Young and Midlife Individuals
We use wearable and diary-based data to investigate menstrual phase and age effects on finger temperature, sleep, heart rate (HR), physical activity, physical symptoms, and mood.
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A Longitudinal Study of the Relationship Between Alcohol-Related Blackouts and Attenuated Structural Brain Development
Alcohol-related blackouts (ARBs) are common in adolescents and emerging adults. ARBs may also be indicative of persistent, alcohol-related neurocognitive changes. This study explored ARBs as a predictor of altered structural…
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Metadata-conditioned generative models to synthesize anatomically-plausible 3D brain MRIs
To generate high-quality T1-weighted MRIs relevant for neuroscience discovery, we present a two-stage Diffusion Probabilistic Model (called BrainSynth) to synthesize high-resolution MRIs conditionally-dependent on metadata (such as age and sex).…