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Biography

Dr. Drummond first became fascinated with sleep research when he volunteered as an undergraduate research assistant in the Sleep Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona under the direction of Richard Bootzin, PhD and Michael Perlis, PhD (then a graduate student). After college, he worked with Sarah Mosko, PhD at UC Irvine Medical Center investigating mother-infant co-sleeping. For graduate school, he attended the SDSU-UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology where he worked with J. Christian Gillin, MD. He completed his Pre-doctoral Internship at the Tucson VA hospital and then returned to UCSD as a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Gregory G. Brown PhD. He joined the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry in October 2002.

Research Interests

Dr. Drummond's main program of research seeks to understand the impact of sleep and sleep deprivation on cognitive performance, brain function, as well as overall clinical symptoms and quality of life. He conducts both experimental studies and clinical studies.

Typically, his experimental studies manipulate sleep deprivation in healthy adults and measure the consequent cognitive and cerebral changes through behavioral and cognitive testing, functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), and EEG. In addition to experimental studies in young healthy normal control subjects, his work also includes healthy older adults and clinical populations such as obstructive sleep apnea and insomnia. He is interested in a number of cognitive performance domains, particularly learning and memory, executive function, attention, and decision making. The overall goals of this line of work are to: 1) better understand the impact of sleep and sleep loss on cognition; 2) predict individual vulnerability and resiliency to sleep loss; and 3) design interventions to mitigate against the negative effects when sleep deprivation is unavoidable.

A second area of research interest is in the interaction between sleep and substance use/abuse. In the past, this has included sleep patterns during recovery from alcohol dependence. More recently, he has examined a) the effects of medicinal cannabis on sleep in patients with HIV-related neuropathy; and b) the effects of abstinence from cannabis on sleep in adolescent cannabis abusers.

A third major area of research interest examines empirically validated treatments for the insomnia and nightmares, particularly in PTSD patients. One current study examines the added benefit of providing targeted treatment for nightmares and insomnia on top of more standard treatment for the daytime symptoms of PTSD.

Clinical Focus

His clinical interests lie largely in sleep disorders, particularly behavioral sleep medicine. Dr. Drummond has an active clinical role in the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System as the Associate Director of the Cognitive Behavioral Interventions Program. This clinic treats insomnia and nightmares in a variety of patient populations, including PTSD, mood disorders, and primary care patients.