Dr. Alexandros Vgontzas

Keynote Lecture:
Phenotyping chronic insomnia based on objective sleep measures: diagnostic and treatment implications

Alexandros Vgontzas was born and raised in Athens Greece where he studied medicine and completed a 3-year program in Neurology- Psychiatry. In 1985 he moved to the United States where he completed his training in psychiatry and sleep medicine. He is board certified in psychiatry and sleep medicine by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.  In 2000 he was promoted to the rank of tenured professor at Penn State College of Medicine and he was awarded the Anthony Kales Endowed Chair of Sleep Disorders Medicine. He is the director of the Sleep Research and Treatment Center of Department of Psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine. He has also served for a number of years as Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Crete, with main focus the development of community mental health services in underserved areas.

His research is focused on insomnia and sleep apnea and he has published more than 240 peer reviewed papers highly cited. Applying neuroendocrinology and neuroimmunology, he has pioneered novel concepts in the field of sleep medicine, such as that sleep apnea is a manifestation of the metabolic syndrome and that insomnia, a disorder of physiologic and psychological hyperarousal, can be reliably and meaningfully phenotyped based on objective measures of sleep duration. His research is funded by NIH and other public institutions.