CDHarding Consulting

About me

Background and Services

As a former academic researcher (University of Oxford, University of California San Diego) now working in clinical trials management and health product development, I provide a specialist skillset to help companies navigate the complex landscape of health technology innovation

Based in the south of England, I have experience working in both local and international health research environments

Odin Vision 2026

University of California, San Diego 2023

University of Oxford 2018

Experience

Health Research

8 years post-graduate experience in health research at the intersection of sleep and circadian rhythms, neurocognitive disorders and cardiovascular disease

Project Management

Managing multi-disciplinary research teams in carrying out complex research projects, including clinical trials and peer-reviewed publications

Statistical Analysis

Expertise in statistical analysis of complex health data sets, including descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing and machine learning, using R, Python and MATLAB

Works

Delivery of National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) funded clinical trial "Is Obstructive Sleep Apnea Important in the Development of Alzheimer's Disease?" (NCT05094271)

Validation of diagnositic models trained on clinical data using sensitivity, specificity, ROC-AUC, and precision-recall metrics

Published >10 original scientific articles and literature reviews in prestigious journals including Science

Schmidt AI Research Software Engineering hackathon 2025 (1st prize)

Interview on Canadian national radio show "A Little More Conversation" with host Ben O'Hara-Byrne:

Download audio

Penguins snatch seconds-long microsleeps

Science - Review Article

Considerable research efforts have been committed to understanding the fundamental biology of sleep. Yet, this knowledge is mostly derived from laboratory studies undertaken in a handful of model organisms, such as mice, rats, and fruit flies, and in conditions that are vastly different from those where sleep evolved. Studies of nonmodel organisms in natura may help elucidate functions of sleep, but this is still largely uncharted territory and presents numerous challenges—from unconventional anatomy and physiology to distinct ecological specialization and environmental influences. On page 1026 of this issue, Libourel et al. report an unusual pattern of frequent short bouts of sleep in wild chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus), which calls into question not only the current understanding of how sleep architecture is regulated but also the extent to which it can be altered before the benefits of sleep are lost.

Lead author: Christian Harding

Co-author: Vladyslav Vyazovskiy

Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Publications

Full list of publications available here

Johnston, E. K., Bird, E. M., Malhotra, A., & Harding, C. D. (2026). Is pharmacotherapy ready to redefine the state of the art in obstructive sleep apnea care? Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/14656566.2026.2634201

Harding C. D., Holloway B. M., DeYoung P. N., Kwan C., Djonlagic I., Ancoli-Israel S., Sun X., Jain S., Banks S. J., Malhotra A. (2025) Procedural learning worsens with OSA severity in older adults and is insensitive to short exposure supplemental oxygen therapy. Sleep Med. 136: 106821.

Harding, C. D., Holloway B. M., DeYoung P. N., Kwan C., Djonlagic I., Ancoli-Israel S., Banks S. J., & Malhotra A. (2025) Subjective daytime sleepiness, not sleep quality or hypoxia, predicts sleep-dependent memory consolidation in a cohort of older adults. J Clin Sleep Med. doi: 10.5664/jcsm.11648.

Guillaumin, M. C. C., Harding, C. D., Krone, L. B., et al., (2025) Deficient synaptic neurotransmission results in a persistent sleep-like cortical activity across vigilance states in mice, Curr Biol, 35(8), 1716 - 1729

Harding, C. D., Fuentes, A. L., & Malhotra, A. (2024). Tackling obstructive sleep apnea with pharmacotherapeutics: expert guidance. Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy, 25(8), 1019–1026.

Harding, C. D., & Vyazovskiy, V. V. (2023). Penguins snatch seconds-long microsleeps. Science, 382(6674), 994–995

Harding, C. D., Guillaumin, M. C. C., Krone, L. B., Kahn, M. C., Blanco-Duque, C., Mikutta, C., & Vyazovskiy, V. V. (2023). Detection of neuronal OFF periods as low amplitude neural activity segments. BMC Neuroscience, 24(1), 1–15.

Harding, C. D., Yovel, Y., Peirson, S. N., Hackett, T. D., & Vyazovskiy, V. V. (2022). Re-examining extreme sleep duration in bats: implications for sleep phylogeny, ecology, and function. Sleep, 45:8