Dr. Bender is currently Director of Clinical Sleep Science at Cerebra Medical and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary.

Her current research focus at Cerebra Medical is to help people sleep better by improving sleep disorder treatments with more precise digital sleep metrics. She is passionate about translating sleep science for others to understand and take action with interviews on over 30 podcasts, numerous community and conference presentations, and 14 peer-reviewed publications.

She started in the sleep field over 14 years ago as a sleep technologist/RPSGT working at a clinical sleep disorders centre and a world-renowned sleep research laboratory at Washington State University, Sleep and Performance Research Center.

She then received her master’s and PhD degrees in Experimental Psychology from Washington State University where she specialized in interindividual responses to sleep deprivation studying the sleep EEG.

Dr. Bender then came to Canada for a Mitacs postdoctoral fellowship at the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary which was ranked the #1 sport science school in North America. During her work as a postdoc, she helped develop the only validated sleep screening tool for athletes and implemented sleep optimization strategies for numerous Canadian Olympic and professional teams. She won the 2017 Mitacs National award for product commercialization and was selected as one of Mitacs next 150 innovators.

After her postdoc, Dr. Bender was the leader of Research and Outcomes at Calgary Counselling Centre where she managed a team of 10 research analysts/assistants, students, and volunteers with an interest in how sleep and exercise interventions could improve mental health.

She was a former college basketball hall of fame athlete, completed an Ironman in 2009, and currently chases her 3 young kids around.