Nicholas Stavropoulos’ research merges the study of animal behavior, genetic analysis, molecular neurobiology, and biochemistry. His primary research focus is on sleep.

Although sleep is a fundamental animal behavior that is millions of years old and whose importance is widely appreciated, the mechanisms that underlie its regulation and function are still not well understood. Dr. Stavropoulos’s research exploited the fact that the genetically accessible fruit fly, drosophila melanogaster, sleeps in a manner strikingly similar to mammals. He conducted a large-scale analysis of sleep-wake behavior in nearly 21,000 chemically mutagenized animals, isolated and characterized insomniac, a mutant that exhibits a profound decrease in the duration and consolidation of sleep, and then cloned insomniac to show that it functions within the brain to control sleep.

Dr. Stavropoulos’ research showed that insomniac is likely to engage a protein degradation pathway in neurons to regulate sleep, and that Cul3 and Nedd8, two additional genes in this pathway, are vital for the proper regulation of sleep. The expression of these genes within the vertebrate brain suggests that neuronal proteolysis may play a fundamental role in controlling sleep throughout the animal kingdom.