Geriatrics, Gerontology & Elderly Care

Biography

Dr. Shapiro has been involved in sleep research for over forty years. He trained in science and medicine in South Africa subsequently did his PhD in sleep physiology at the University of Edinburgh with Ian Oswald. He did his psychiatry training in Edinburgh and then had a senior lectureship at Edinburgh University before moving to Canada approximately twenty five years ago as a Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. He was Director of the Neuropsychiatry Program at the Toronto Western Hospital and Editor of the Journal of Psychosomatic Research both for close to two decades. He has over 300 refereed publications in this field and two dozen books and booklets including a book on “Forensic aspects of sleep”, and several books for the lay public. He also authored a children’s book “Who needs to sleep anyway” and most recently co-authored a book “STOP THAT and 100 Other Sleep Scales”. His “ABC of sleep medicine” through the BMJ was considered the first book for family physicians on sleep. He has a further 560 publications (chapters, editorials, letters etc) and has supervised over 50 fellows and postgraduate students. One of his interests is sleep changes in psychiatric disease and the extent to which sleep markers are helpful in psychiatry. He founded the British Sleep Society in 1989. In 1998 he founded the International Neuropsychiatric Association. When a resident in Scotland, he set up the first sleep laboratory in Africa and nine years ago he opened the first independent Child and Adolescent Sleep Clinic in Canada.

Research Interest

Sleep research, Neuropyschiatry