Mehdi Tafti is neurophysiologist and geneticist with 38 years of experience in both basic and clinical sleep research. He was a full professor at the Department of Biomedical
Sciences of the University of Lausanne till September 2023. He was also the co-founder in 2006 and co-director of the Center for Investigation and Research in Sleep (CIRS) at
the Lausanne University Hospital till 2018. The main fields of his research are molecular genetics of sleep and central hypersomnias, parasomnians, as well as pharmacology of sleep disorders. His laboratory discovered the first genes regulating several aspects of sleep and sleep EEG in mice as well as many genetic associations for sleep disorders and the only causal
gene mutations in familial and sporadic narcolepsy and Kleine-Levin syndrome. More recently, his laboratory discovered that hypocretin deficiency in narcolepsy may not be due to an autoimmune process but the epigenetic silencing of the hypocretin gene.
