Director selected for sleep research

A U.S. Army doctor and sleep researcher has been chosen the first director of a sleep research initiative based in Spokane.

Col. Gregory Belenky, M.D., was chosen after a committee reviewed fewer than 10 candidates for the job, which will pay about $232,000.

The sleep initiative is the first focus of the Spokane Alliance for Medical Research, an applied-research program targeting projects that can lead to possible commercial development.

Belenky, who has also been given a research professor’s post at Washington State University Spokane, will discuss his work at a public meeting Wednesday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Riverpoint Higher Education Center’s Phase I Classroom Building.

“The vision for the Sleep Research Initiative is to move beyond the laboratory to study the relationship of sleep to performance in normal and clinical populations going about their everyday lives,” Belenky said in a press release.

He currently holds the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and serves as director of the Division of Neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Silver Spring, Md.