Dr. Sanika S. Chirwa is a tenured professor of neuroscience and pharmacology at Meharry Medical College and adjunct professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. He has a strong background in pharmacy, medicine, and biomedical science obtained from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Canada between 1976 and 1988. As a postdoctoral scholar between 1989 and 1992 at the Brain Research Institute of the University of California Los Angeles, he trained in sleep physiology. Presently, Dr. Chirwa is heavily engaged in the training of professional and research students at all levels of their development. He is also an active investigator and his research projects comprises both basic science and clinical research as follows. The basic research is focusing on understanding the neural networks and synaptic plasticity mechanisms responsible for memory encoding and recall in the brain, and how these neural functions are altered by drugs of abuse – e.g. methamphetamine. New project is focusing on determining in the guinea pig model the mechanisms and long-term consequences of prenatal exposure to methamphetamine on neurocognitive functions and behaviors in offspring across the life span. The clinical studies are investigating causal links between sleep deprivation and several clinical complications including adverse pregnancy outcomes (e.g. gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, preterm and hemorrhage), epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease. New studies in development include spearheading the development of a novel high-throughput multidrug mass spectrometry assay to simultaneously quantify multiple drugs widely prescribed to HIV-infected adults. This platform will be used to evaluate and discover how unexpected but clinically significant drug-drug interactions affect many HIV-infected patients as a consequence of polypharmacy for HIV and comorbidities.