Janna D Helfrich, MD

Anesthesia is applied neuroscience, and neuroscience uses anesthesia as a powerful experimental probe to understand how brain networks give rise to consciousness—and how disrupting those networks alters cognition and behavior.

The Helfrich Lab investigates the neurophysiology of unconscious states and their consequences for human cognition, using primarily scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to characterize shared and state-specific neural mechanisms across anesthesia, sleep, and disorders of consciousness.

Our work asks whether anesthesia can be re-engineered to more closely resemble sleep rather than coma, thereby reducing postoperative cognitive side effects while potentially harnessing sleep’s restorative functions, and whether anesthetic perturbations can serve as diagnostic probes to predict recovery trajectories in patients with coma or other disorders of consciousness. The overarching goal of this research is to translate mechanistic insights into improved clinical care for all patients.