This George Mason alum can help you sleep better

In high school and as an undergraduate student, Dan Gartenberg, MA Psychology ’12, PhD ’16, would stay up late and struggle to wake early, a typical experience for many students. Early on in his graduate studies at George Mason University, he took a course on the neuroscience of sleep and was hooked.

Gartenberg became passionate about the study of sleep, due to his own personal struggles with sleep—including delayed sleep phase syndrome and insomnia. He is now founder and CEO of SleepSpace and a scientific advisor to other companies in the sleep science field, including Wesper, Biostrap, CPAP.com,  Perfectly Snug, and MDBiowellness.

“Mason is where I learned to be a scientist, constantly question things, and where I learned the scientific method. That’s an invaluable thing,” he said.

For his dissertation in psychology, Gartenberg worked with the Naval Research Laboratory to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models that could help predict when people, such as pilots, are getting fatigued doing a task for a long period of time by using eye tracking data.

“I was making models of fatigue and using different cognitive tasks to predict when errors would occur,” he said. “You don’t want a pilot to crash a $30 million aircraft, and there are ways to tell when someone is tired based on their [movements].”

Gartenberg published several papers and released his first few sleep apps around this time. He worked closely with the late George Mason professor Raja Parasuraman, an expert in the field who developed one of the main theories of vigilance.

While at George Mason, Gartenberg received grants from the National Science Foundation to test whether playing certain sounds during sleep could encourage deeper sleep. His research team brought people into a lab and hooked them up to polysomnography—like an EEG but used to measure multiple physiological data streams.

They played sounds on the up state of delta brainwaves and showed some evidence that it primes deeper sleep. Gartenberg and his colleagues went on to get more grant funding in that area. But he found having someone wear a device was cumbersome.

“And it wasn’t a great form factor for consumers, so I pivoted a bit toward insomnia,” he said.

Then, in 2020, he received a $2.5 million grant from National Institutes of Health to develop a new digital therapeutic for insomnia. He recently ran a randomized control trial to test this novel therapy. This is the main focus of his company, SleepSpace. He also raised $1.8 million from venture capitalists to build this sleep improvement platform.

First, Gartenberg and team created very accurate sleep trackers. Gartenberg made some algorithms on the Apple watch and using smartphone sensors to track sleep in real time for the purpose of playing sounds to augment sleep and later integrated smart lights.

Gartenberg said that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the treatment for insomnia recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and other academies. So the team built a six-week CBT course with collaborators at Penn State University and the University of Arizona. The software also integrates with sound and light devices to promote improve sleep quality, and includes meditations and interactive content driven by an AI chatbot called Dr. Snooze.

“Our software allows the coach or a sleep doctor to see their client’s data from the app and wearable devices, so they can see the perception of sleep alongside what’s happening and create customized sleep programs,” he said.

Gartenberg and colleagues showed that when people experience the treatment as usual plus the software, more people were able to avoid insomnia remission, and it was more effective at treating it on some metrics. Since launching, they have 30 therapists and coaches using the platform and have seen more than 100,000 downloads.

“We’re augmenting the therapist, not replacing them,” Gartenberg emphasized.

He’s currently working on developing a comprehensive package to improve sleep and also launching a new smart topper and bedsheet called the SleepSpace Smart Sheet that will integrate with his current software and be able to control the temperature on either side of the bed. It can help with falling asleep, hot flashes, night sweats, and navigating different temperature needs of partners.

And it all started at George Mason. Gartenberg said the university played a major role in his career as a scientist and entrepreneur.

“George Mason gave me, as a PhD, the freedom to pursue a lot of different interests that weren’t strictly in one field,” he said. “It was a combination of software development, science, and even intellectual property. I worked with Mason’s [Tech Transfer] team on some patents, and I got my first patent granted through that collaboration.”

Gartenberg’s advice for Mason students is to know who you are and what you want. He took the entrepreneur route, but he admits it’s not for everyone, and it can be quite stressful. However, he thinks entrepreneur skills are more important than ever, especially creative problem solving and persistence.

“If you can creatively solve problems, that can be applied to almost anything.”