Sandra Tamm

I am a medical doctor specialising in psychiatry, with a research focus on sleep in relation to mental health. I am an associate professor (docent) at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, working in Viktor Kaldo's research group within the Centre for Psychiatry Research (CPF), where I lead a team working with sleep in severe mental health. I combine my research with clinical work as a resident psychiatrist (ST-läkare) at Psykiatri Sydväst, Karolinska University Hospital, Huddinge.

My research investigates the mechanisms and clinical consequences of disturbed sleep in psychiatric and somatic conditions, and how effective sleep treatments can be brought into routine care.

During my PhD I used experimental sleep restriction and functional MRI to study how sleep loss affects emotional processing and empathy across age groups. I also studied the role of low-grade inflammation as a mechanism behind fatigue and depressive symptoms in patients with severe allergy, using PET imaging. As a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the University of Oxford (2019-2021), I worked on large-scale cohort analyses (UK Biobank) and randomised clinical trials on sleep and mental health, including digital cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) in people with depressive symptoms.

I currently lead a randomised controlled trial evaluating an acute psychological sleep intervention for patients hospitalised with depression in psychiatric inpatient care, alongside work developing and implementing a structured clinical decision-support tool for pharmacological sleep treatment in acute psychiatry.

I have authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications, including in JAMA Network Open and the American Journal of Psychiatry, and I supervise several PhD, master's, and specialist-training projects. I collaborate internationally through networks including the ENIGMA-Sleep working group The European Insomnia Network, and together with Mats Lekander I lead the Swedish stress research podcast Stressforskningspodden.

I teach across several programmes at Karolinska Institutet, mainly for the medical programme. I also provide clinical supervision of medical students as part of my clinical work, and I have lectured internationally on sleep and mental health, including a workshop on cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia and the Oxford Online Sleep programme at the University of Oxford, and courses on stress, sleep, and health at KI and Stockholm University.