Ksenia Valerievna Lapshina graduated from the Department of General Physiology, Faculty of Biology and Soil Sciences, Saint-Petersburg State University in 2006. She received her Ph.D. in Physiology in 2011. She is currently working as a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Comparative Thermophysiology, Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Her expertise is in the fields of animal models of Parkinson's disease, neurodegeneration, aquaporins, molecular chaperones, thermoregulation, sleep mechanisms, animal polysomnography and sleep stage analysis.

Irina V. Ekimova is an Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Comparative Thermophysiology at the Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, Saint Petersburg, Russia. She is a specialist in the field of comparative thermophysiology and neurobiology of sleep, fundamental problems of biomedicine. Her research interests include the neurochemistry of sleep and thermoregulation, protective effects of heat shock proteins, and neurodegenerative pathologies. Her scientific achievements lie in the mediator mechanisms of sleep regulation in birds were deciphered, the cellular and molecular mechanisms of the somnogenic, thermoregulatory and anticonvulsant action of the stress-inducible protein Hsp70 were investigated, the role of HSP70 chaperones in the mechanisms of brain functions protection from stress and neurotoxic factors was revealed, approaches for preventive chaperone therapy of Parkinson’s disease were developed.