Giulio Tononi received his medical degree from the University of Pisa, Italy, where he specialized in Psychiatry. He then obtained a Ph.D. in neuroscience as a fellow of the Scuola Superiore for his work on sleep regulation. From 1990 to 2000, he was a member of The Neurosciences Institute, first in New York and then in San Diego. He is currently Professor of Psychiatry, Distinguished Professor in Consciousness Science, the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness. Dr. Tononi’s laboratory studies consciousness and its disorders as well as the mechanisms and functions of sleep. Dr. Tononi has developed the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis about the function of sleep. According to the hypothesis, sleep serves to renormalize synaptic strength, counterbalancing a net increase of synaptic strength due to plasticity during wakefulness. Dr. Tononi’s is the author of the integrated information theory about consciousness. For his work on sleep, he has received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (2005) and the Harvard Medical School’s Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine (2017) for his outstanding lifetime contributions to the field. For his work on consciousness, he has received the Max Planck Institute’s Klaus Joachim Zülch Prize (2017) and the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology’s Leibniz Chair (2018). Dr. Tononi is also the recipient of the Academy of Sleep and Consciousness’s Bernese Sleep Award (2018) and the Humboldt Foundation’s distinguished Humboldt Research Prize (2018).