Three and a half years after Washington State University launched its Sleep and Performance Research Center here, the lab has conducted studies for a host of clients while securing grants and contracts to cover its $1.5 million annual budget.

The center, launched in 2004 with $4.5 million in federal funds, has done work for the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Transportation, Continental Airlines, W.M. Keck Foundation, and others, says Dr. Greg Belenky, a WSU research professor and the center's director.

The center was the brainchild of the Spokane Alliance for Medical Research, which sought to meld the medical capabilities of Spokane's health-care community and the research power of its universities to generate research that would attract national funding and attention. The center, which was intended to be self-supporting, has more than done that, raising $7.5 million in grants and contracts, says Belenky. It already has funded its activities for another two to three years.

"It meets the high end of expectations," Belenky says. "It's been very successful."

The center has eight full-time staff members, four graduate students who are involved in research, and up to 15 other students who help with sleep tests.

Belenky, who ran the Army's research program on sleep and performance for 20 years before retiring from the military, is especially excited about the implications of the findings in an as-yet unpublished study by WSU clinical psychology doctoral student Jennifer Lynn McDonald.

In that study, McDonald looked at the sleep of medical residents in emergency rooms at Spokane hospitals. Some of the medical residents worked day shifts and some worked 13-hour "night float" shifts, Belenky says. Both groups got seven hours of sleep a day, which is adequate to maintain performance, but the latter group slept an average of just under four hours while off shift during the day and another 2.6 hours during sanctioned napping when emergency-room activity slowed in the wee hours of the morning. In both sets of medical residents, performance remained unchanged.

McDonald's study suggests that the way for employers to manage the night shift is to schedule time for employees to nap, Belenky says.

"One way to manage the night shift is to make it longer, to provide sleep opportunities during the small hours of the morning, when sleep propensity is high," he says. "It is consistent with what has been found: Total sleep time is what matters. You can split your sleep time into two or three episodes as long as the total is OK."

Belenky quips that the Army, because of its night vision equipment, has a saying, "We own the night," which causes some officers to joke, "And now we have to staff it." He says, "It is a challenge. If you work out of normal circadian phase, you have to sleep out of cycle, too." A circadian phase is a normal biological rhythm within a 24-hour period.

When night-shift personnel sleep during the day, their body temperatures rise at about 1 p.m. and they wake up, Belenky says. He says that typically, night-shift personnel get only five hours of sleep a day, which reduces their effectiveness.

"This is a new idea," he says of the approach of incorporating into night shifts time to nap. "This might be an effective way of staffing the night."

Half of the world's people, though not schedule-conscious North Americans and Europeans, divide their sleep by taking naps every day, he says, adding, "This is quite doable."

Belenky also was excited about McDonald's successful defense last week of her dissertation, the core of which was her study of the medical residents and a study of the effect of extended hours on workers at HollisterStier Laboratories LLC here during an annual disassembly, cleaning, and rebuilding of equipment.

For every additional hour the workers put in, they lost about an hour of sleep, which reduced their total sleep below the needed seven hours a day. Still, their performance, as measured in "psychomotor vigilance tests" conducted on Palm Pilots that capture response times to the appearance of an image on the screen, didn't suffer, perhaps because the extra-work period was relatively brief. Certain factors, however, weren't controlled in that test.

Currently, the sleep center is doing occupation-related sleep studies for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. In one study, the center is studying a rule that restricts truckers to working a maximum of 60 hours in a seven-day period or 70 hours in an eight-day period and requires them to take a 34-hour "restart" break, without working, before they begin new seven- or eight-day periods.

The center also is doing two other studies for that agency, including one on the effect of current regulations on the sleep and performance of motor coach drivers and another on the health effects on truck drivers of split sleep.

For Continental Airlines, the center is preparing to do a study on how ultra long-range airline flights, which are longer than 16 hours at least 10 percent of the time, affect the sleep and performance of pilots.

New fuel-efficient airliners built by Boeing and Airbus are making 20- to 22-hour flights possible, and because of that the airlines will be flying more ultra long-range flights, Belenky says.

"The FAA is treating them as new," even though such flights were common when much slower propeller aircraft flew long-distance routes, he says.

To prepare for the study, a month ago Belenky flew on a Continental Airlines flight from Newark, N.J., to Hong Kong. He says that all four of the pilots on the flight were awake and at the controls during the one-hour periods before and during takeoff and landing.

During the other 14 hours of the flight, two of the pilots had the first of two seven-hour rest-sleep "opportunities," and in the other seven hours, the other two pilots had the second such opportunity. The resting pilots lied down in berths just outside the cockpit.

On flights that are longer than seven hours but less than 16 hours, the airlines staff their aircraft with four pilots, three, or two, Belenky says. He says that a friend of his, Curt Graeber, who served as the Army's chief scientist for human performance issues at one time, showed while with NASA that brief cockpit naps prior to landing improved performance. Despite his findings, the FAA didn't institute cockpit napping, although air-travel regulators in other countries did, Belenky says. American Airlines and Delta Airlines also have become involved in the Continental study, he says.

The FAA has agreed that modeling, or the application of scientific knowledge about how lack of sleep affects performance, should be employed in the study of ultra long-range flights, Belenky says. He says the scientific knowledge includes a set of studies that can be used to calculate the effect of "any conceivable schedule" on pilots' performance.

He says the studies can be used "to make mathematical models that can be integrated into commercial rostering and scheduling software," along with "constraints such as crew availability, routes, planes ready to fly," and other factors, to schedule crews.

The Army, Navy, and Air Force mainly have provided infrastructure and financial support for the center's studies so far, while the W.M. Keck Foundation, of Los Angeles, which funds science, engineering, and medical research projects to help solve complex issues, is funding a study of sleep in localized areas of the brain, Belenky says.

"Depending on how much you use different parts of the brain, they will go to sleep sooner," he says. "Different parts of the brain can go to sleep independently of one another."

The center, which originally opened its offices in the Health Sciences Building, at Riverpoint, now is in the South Campus Facility, or the former F.O. Berg building, where it has doubled its floor space to 5,000 square feet, Belenky says.

It has four individual bedrooms, each with a bed "wired up" to capture "polysomnographic" recordings, or sleep readings, Belenky says.

Subjects can't leave the lab during studies, can't have contact with anyone on the outside, and don't have access to a phone, the Internet, e-mail, or live TV, Belenky says.

In addition to its bedrooms, the center has two driving simulators so it can measure subjects' performance behind the wheel. It has just installed a pair of "deadly force encounter simulators," in which "you fire at targets," or "bad guys," and "the targets fire back," Belenky says. He says those simulators will be used in studies for the Justice Department and the Defense Department of how sleep loss affects the willingness to use deadly force.

Sleep research can involve investigating animals' ability to sleep, Belenky says. For example, he says, ducks can sleep with half of their brain at a time if, say, they're on the outside edge of a resting flock, or with both halves if they're in the middle of the flock.

Seals can sleep with half of their brain while they swim, or with both halves when they're on land. Dolphins sleep with half a brain routinely, and Belenky says the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has taken a look at whether transcranial magnetic stimulation can be used to get people to sleep with half of their brain. He says the same technology, which involves the use of "intense" magnets, has been used in attempts to treat depression, multiple sclerosis, and cocaine addiction.

As for men and women, Belenky says that after menopause, women typically resume sleeping eight or nine hours a night, as they did when they were younger, but as men age, they aren't so lucky.

The depth of their sleep reduces, and they wake up much more often during the night. Belenky says men suffer from "issues related to the prostate," are troubled more by aches and pains while sleeping than women, and react more to sounds and disturbances.