Faculty Expert Profile

Rachel Salas's primary area of research involves exploring the underlying mechanisms of sleep and chronic sleep disorders such as insomnia and Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS). More specifically, her long-term goal is to better understand changes in cortical activity associated with insomnia and RLS, in order to improve treatment for these conditions.

In addition to her clinical research, Salas is involved in medical student, resident, and fellow education and currently serves as the co-director of the Neurology Core Clerkship for Medical Students and is the co-director for the Neurology Resident and Neurophysiology Fellow JHH Sleep Rotation. She is particularly interested in enhancing sleep education at all levels. As the primary investigator in the neurobiology of sleep, done in the spirit of the new era of collaborative research, she has been a co-investigator on other collaborative sleep scholarship projects in an effort to remain diverse in the domain of sleep medicine.

She is a co-author on manuscripts on my collaborating projects evaluating sleep in the following populations: HIV (sleep patterns and a second on cognition and sleep), black residents of Baltimore, one in Parkinson disease and REM behavioral sleep disorder, and is currently the PI on a collaborative project assessing the sleep environment in an effort to validate a sleep environmental inventory that she created.