Simon Durrant is Director of the Lincoln Sleep Research Centre and Director of Research in the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln.  Trained as neuroscientist and psychologist, Dr Durrant holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield and a DPhil from the University of Sussex.  He previously worked in the NaPS laboratory at the University of Manchester.

Dr Durrant's sleep research has covered a broad variety of areas, but with a specialist focus on the effects of sleep and sleep disorders on the mind and brain.  He work includes studies on sleep-dependent memory consolidation, reactivation in the sleeping brain, the role of REM sleep and the BDNF and 5-HTTPLPR genes in depression vulnerability, sleep restriction therapy, genetic vulnerability to  cognitive deficits associated with sleep deprivation, and computational models of sleep EEG.  He is author of the influential iOtA model of sleep-dependent memory abstraction and the aTaC model of REM sleep density and depression vulnerability.  As a research scientist, he employs a variety of methods including lab-based and home-based polysomnography, actigraphy, EEG, fMRI, psychometric and cognitive testing, and geneotyping.