Welcome Dr. Maxwell Shafer

We would like to welcome Dr. Maxwell Shafer (Assistant Professor, Department of Cell & Systems Biology), to the CPIN Program.

The goal of the Shafer Lab is to decode the genomics and evolution of sleep across the tree of life. Animals can have different chronotypes (‘early-birds’ and ‘night-owls’) or spend variable amounts of time asleep (from as little as 2hrs to 18hrs a day). Species can shift the phase of their circadian activity (nocturnal or diurnal), restrict activity to specific periods of the day (dawn or dusk), or lose rhythmicity entirely. The lab aims to identify the genes and circuits responsible for shifts in circadian activity (diurnal or nocturnal), and to comprehend their evolutionary causes and consequences. The Shafer Lab uses a combination of bioinformatic and computational genomic comparisons across species, ancestral reconstructions of sleep across hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and behavioural, neurobiological, and molecular comparisons between focal species (diurnal and nocturnal species of fish).