This month, the Senate confirmed Mark R. Rosekind, PhD, as the new administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This is significant to the sleep medicine community as Rosekind is a sleep and fatigue expert, whose career has focused on public safety threats posed by fatigue, circadian misalignment and untreated sleep disorders. He is likely to bring sleep issues such as drowsy driving to the forefront of the national conversation.
Rosekind is a member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), a position he has held since 2010. Prior to his service on the NTSB, he was president and chief scientist of Alertness Solutions from 1997 to 2010.
From 1996 to 1997, Rosekind was chief of the aviation operations branch in the Flight Management and Human Factors Division with NASA Ames Research Center. Rosekind also served as a research scientist at the Ames Research Center and team leader for the Fatigue Countermeasures Program in the Aviation Safety Research Branch of the Flight Management and Human Factors Division from 1990 to 1997. From 1989 to 1990, he was a research associate in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. From 1987 to 1989, Rosekind was a postdoctoral fellow in Sleep and Chronobiology at Brown University Medical School. Rosekind received an AB from Stanford University and an MS, an MPhil, and a PhD from Yale University.
On November 19, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Rosekind to the Department of Transportation post.
