Manuel Carro Dominguez
Curriculum Vitae
Originally from Spain and raised in Ireland, Manu holds both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Trinity College Dublin. In 2024, Manu completed his PhD at the Neural Control of Movement lab at ETH Zurich under the supervision of PD Dr. Caroline Lustenberger, Prof. Sarah Meissner, and Prof. Nicole Wenderoth. His doctoral research focused on understanding how fluctuations in arousal levels—indexed by pupil size—interact with sleep rhythms, and how these rhythms relate to overnight changes in motor performance and fatigue. During his postdoctoral work, he used a multimodal approach to investigate how pre-sleep and post-sleep stress modulation affects the brain and body’s sleep physiology. Manu is now commercializing his doctoral and postdoctoral work as an ETH Pioneer Fellow at the Brain-Body Regulation Lab, where he is developing a smart sleep mask for better managing brain health.
Research Interests
Poor sleep affects nearly a third of the population and is tied to debilitating neurological conditions like Alzheimer's, yet current at-home devices cannot monitor the deep-brain circuits that show the first signs of dysfunction. To address this, he is developing Biomasker, a smart sleep mask that tracks pupil dynamics—a powerful proxy for deep-brain activity—through closed eyelids. By bridging the gap between clinical brain health diagnostics and consumer wearables, Manu aims to provide the first scalable solution for earlier detection of poor sleep and personalized brain health therapy.
Professur Gehirn-Körper-Regulation
Gloriastrasse 37/ 39
8092
Zürich
Switzerland