Anne Germain, PhD

Dr. Anne Germain is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, and is Director of the University of Pittsburgh Sleep and Behavioral Neuroscience Center. She is Director of Military Sleep Tactics of Resilience Research Team. At the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Germain also holds secondary appointments in Psychology, and in Clinical and Translational Science.

Dr. Germain received a Bachelor of Science in psychology from McGill University in 1996, and completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Université de Montréal in 2001. She then pursued post-doctoral training in clinical sleep research and sleep neuroimaging at the University of Pittsburgh, and joined the Faculty in the Department of Psychiatry in 2005.

Dr. Germain’s research program has two main areas of interest. A first area of interest focuses on the neural underpinnings and effects of acute sleep loss and chronic sleep disturbances occurring in the context of stress-related psychiatric disorders, with a special emphasis on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in military populations. To do accomplish this, she uses multimodal sleep measurement methods including self-report measures, actigraphy and polysomnography, quantitative EEG, pharmacological probes, sleep neuroimaging techniques, as well as novel animal models. A second area of interest focuses on the development, adaptation, testing, and implementation of treatments targeting trauma-related sleep disturbances to enhance psychological resilience and to hasten recovery from trauma exposure.

Dr. Germain has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles, and recently co-edited a book entitled, Sleep and Combat-Related PTSD (Spinger, 2018). She is also the author of 25 book chapters and invited papers on insomnia, nightmares, treatments of sleep disorders, and sleep in the context of PTSD and other trauma-related disorders. Her h-index is 36. She has served on various committees of the Sleep Research Society and American Academy of Sleep Medicine. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Behavioral Sleep Medicine, and is a regular peer reviewer for specialized journals on sleep, trauma, and psychiatry. She has served and continues to serve on various study sections for the Department of Defense, the NIH, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.