SomnusNooze
The Board of Directors of the Hypersomnia Foundation is pleased to introduce three new board members to the Board of Directors, Scientific Advisory Board, and Medical Advisory Board.
Diane Powell and to announce the appointment of two new members of the Scientific Advisory Board, Prof. Nicholas Franks and Dr. James Krueger. As members of the Scientific Advisory Board, Prof. Franks and Dr. Krueger will be assisting the Board of Directors in developing a grant application and review process, as well as in setting a research agenda and reviewing requests for use of data from the Hypersomnia Foundation’s registry.
Diane Powell, LCSW
Diane is a founding member of Maverick Collective, a women’s philanthropy group working with 
Population Services International, Inc., to benefit women and girls in developing countries. Diane is sponsoring a pilot project in southern Senegal to reduce maternal mortality and improve child nutrition.
As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Diane has used her skills to provide psychotherapy for clients struggling with anxiety, depression, bipolar illness and many other mental health diagnoses. Her previous community projects include leading a task force on alcohol abuse among expat teens in Singapore and founding a bereavement support group for young widows and widowers in Florida. Through a program of the Episcopal Church, Diane helped lead the launch of community projects in Guatemala among Mayan populations devastated by years of civil war.
Diane is president and co-founder of The Robertson Powell Foundation, which supports research and innovation in the field of health.
In 2014, an alert physician named Karel Kooper at the University of Southern California’s Health Center referred Diane’s daughter for an evaluation at the Tower Sleep Center at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. The daytime sleepiness that she had been struggling with since age 14 was diagnosed by Dr. Roy Artal as hypersomnia. Since then, Diane and her husband, Andrew, discovered the Hypersomnia Foundation and are proud to support its work and the research of Dr. David Rye.
Professor Nicholas Franks, FRSB, FRCA, FMedSci, FRS
As Professor of Biophysics & Anaesthetics at London’s Imperial College, Prof. Nicholas Franks has sought to understand how general anesthetic agents work at the molecular, cellular, and, most recently, neuronal network levels. Almost 40 years ago, he asked the question, “Where do general anaesthetics act?” in the journal Nature and has been pursuing the answer through funded studies in his laboratory since that time. Along the way, he has expanded his research to better understand the relationships among anesthesia, consciousness, and sleep and has also asked, and answered, the question, “Do sedatives engage natural sleep pathways?” Among the many discoveries that he has made throughout his long and storied career, Prof. Franks recently identified the exact binding location of propofol to the GABA-A receptor.
In 2007, Prof. Franks was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Anaesthetists and, in 2011, Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been awarded the Ebert Prize of the American Pharmaceutical Association, the Gold Medal of the Royal College of Anaesthetists, and the Excellence in Research Award from the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
James M. Krueger, PhD
Dr. Krueger is Regents Professor of Neuroscience in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine at Washington State University. Early in his career as a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Krueger worked with 
Dr. John Pappenheimer to isolate, purify, and characterize Factor S and subsequently published their seminal work in The Proceedings of the National Academy in 1978. Today he is recognized as a worldwide expert on sleep in his own right.
Among Dr. Krueger’s numerous awards are election to the Washington State Academy of Sciences and recipient of the Doctorem Medicinae Honoris Causa from the University of Szeged, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Sleep Research Society, and the Senator Jacob Javits Award in the Neurosciences from the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Krueger’s research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for over 28 years; it is focused on the biochemical regulation of sleep, molecular mechanisms responsible for the effects of infectious diseases and inflammation on sleep, sleep function, and brain organization of the initiation of sleep.
Dr. Krueger’s 350 peer-reviewed publications cover the gamut from sleep function to sleep and cytokines, and physiological markers of localized sleep. His latest research documents his theoretical predictions that sleep originates in small neural networks, discoveries that open the door to a deeper appreciation of the genetic, molecular, and electrical aspects of sleep disorders.