Giulio Tononi, MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. He is the director of the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin, which focuses on the function of sleep and the nature of consciousness.. Together with his collaborators, he has been developing and testing a comprehensive hypothesis on the function of sleep, the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. Research on consciousness has led to the integrated information theory, which tries to account for what consciousness is, how it can be measured, and how it is realized in the brain.He received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the John W. Severinghaus Award, the Pisa Sleep Award and he holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Professor in Consciousness Science.