Ward Pettibone

Ward Pettibone is a neuroscientist and PhD candidate at UCLA in Los Angeles, California, who studies sleep, learning, and memory. He conducts his doctoral research at UCLA, where his current project asks whether local sleep, in which different brain regions are in different sleep states at the same time, supports spatial learning, and whether learning changes the sleep that follows. He built custom local field potential electrodes for simultaneous recordings from four brain regions, as well as an automated spatial-learning apparatus that he also programmed.

He earned a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from New York University, where his undergraduate research examined episodic-like memory. Before graduate school, he was an associate researcher at Mount Sinai, studying motor gist learning, tau tangles, and sleep. He is an author on six research publications.

His honors include a Poster Award at the UCLA BRI Future of Neuroscience conference (2024), the UCLA BRI/Semel Institute Graduate Student Travel Award (2024), the UCLA BRI Flexible Travel Award (2023), and the Science Communication Award, UCLA (2021). In 2020, he gave an invited talk, Multiverse: Your Brain on Sleep, at the Museum of Science in Boston.