Cores

Biobehavioral Tool Core (BTC)

Dr. Carol Landis and Dr. Karen Thomas are the Co-Directors of the Biobehavioral Tools Core (BTC). Dr. Landis is presently a Co-Investigator and Scientific Director of the Biobehavioral Laboratories in the Center for Women's Health and Gender Research (CWHGR). She has experience with measuring self-report, actigraphy, and polysomnography measures of sleep in children, midlife and older women.

The CRMSD Biobehavioral Tools Core (CRMSD-BTC) develops, maintains, and ensures the overall quality of instrumentation important for conducting research on the management of sleep disturbances in individuals across the lifespan. The CRMSD-BTC coordinates and ensures high-quality electronic study management to increase productivity, enhance efficiency and synergy among projects associated with the UW-CRMSD. The CRMSD-BTC integrates diverse clinical and research disciplines in order to improve sleep of individuals and their families. The CRMSD-BTC also serves as a catalyst and resource by developing and enhancing truly interdisciplinary research.

School of Nursing Sleep Lab

The specific aims of the CRMSD-BTC core are as follows:

1. Establish, maintain, and coordinate scholarly interdisciplinary support and interaction about use of common measures in studies affiliated with the Center.
2. Develop, refine, and provide consultation about 'state of the art' reliable, precise, and cost-effective instrumentation to support new and ongoing developmentally and age-appropriate self-report, behavioral (actigraphy) and physiologic (polysomnography [PSG]) measures of sleep disturbance.
3. Provide data processing and scoring services for actigraphy and expand laboratory methods for use of PSG in very young children.
4. Create an infrastructure and services for electronic study management using new web-based technologies to integrate and unify data and ensure high-quality data capture and study oversight.
5. Maintain high quality, 'state of the art' methods for the collection of samples and measurement of biomarkers (e.g. biochemical, molecular, genetic) and physiologic indicators (e.g., autonomic nervous system) that are important for understanding the biologic basis of adverse health outcomes of disturbed sleep.

The ITHS Biomedical Informatics Core (BMI) is used as a central location for electronic data capture (EDC) for each of the 4 projects.

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