Susan Redline, MD, MPH is the Farrell Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard TH School of Public Health, and Director of Sleep Medicine Epidemiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She earned a BA-MD degree at Boston University and an MPH at Harvard School of Public Health. She completed fellowships in pulmonary disease at Case Western Reserve University and in respiratory epidemiology at Harvard School of Medicine.
When her career began, little was known about the role of sleep in health, nor which groups are most at risk for sleep disorders and their sequelae. She aimed to fill these gaps by designing and leading large, cohort studies and clinical trials of adults and children, as well as by engaging patients as research partners, and by establishing a large sleep data repository. Through longitudinal studies and collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams, she helped to identify genetic, socio-demographic, and environmental risk factors for sleep disorders, as well as quantified the role of sleep metrics (including novel metrics of physiological stress and disease endotypes) on a wide range of health outcomes. Her work identified the heterogeneity of sleep apnea related to age, gender, and social determinants of health. Her work highlighted important gender differences in the pathophysiology, presentation, and outcomes of sleep apnea, suggesting that typical clinical metrics of sleep apnea underestimate disease severity in women, who have a sleep apnea phenotype better described by short apneic events and high autonomic response. She found that children from disadvantaged neighborhoods are at increased risk for sleep apnea, with risk partially attributable to environmental tobacco smoke and poor air quality. She established the first large family-based study of sleep apnea, which informed genome-wide association and multi-omic analyses that identified genetic variants and metabolomic risk scores for sleep apnea. She led randomized controlled studies that addressed the roles of CPAP and oxygen for treatment of sleep apnea and the role of surgery for treatment of pediatric sleep disordered breathing, finding that adenotonsillectomy may be beneficial for improving behavior and blood pressure even in children who snore without frequent apneas. To promote sleep data sharing, she established the National Sleep Research Resource that contains sleep data from over 50,000 subjects, and, to date, has shared 2 petabytes of data across almost 11,000 users world-wide. Finally, she has supported a sleep apnea patient-focused virtual community and works actively with patient advocates to improve patient education and support.