Carlos H. Schenck, M.D.

Biography

Dr. Carlos H. Schenck received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and M.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He completed a psychiatry residency in 1980 at the University of Minnesota, where he is a professor and senior staff psychiatrist at the Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC). Since 1982 he has been a staff physician at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center at HCMC.

Dr. Schenck and colleagues reported on a new category of parasomnia they named REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD). They were first to report that RBD commonly heralds future parkinsonism, initiating a major international research effort. They identified and named sleep-related (psychogenic) dissociative disorders, sleep-related eating disorder, status dissociatus, ‘Prozac eyes’, epic dream disorder, and parasomnia overlap disorder; formulated the first classification of sexsomnia; and classified the range of parasomnias associated with sleep-disordered breathing.

He was founding President of the International REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Study Group, and a founding member of Sleep Forensics Associates (SFA), which consults on medico-legal cases involving the parasomnia defense. SFA gathered the largest series of sleep forensic cases from a single center, and published on new forensic sleep medicine categories such as parasomnia pseudo-suicide. He was co-chair of the Parasomnias Committee for The International Classification of Sleep Disorders 2nd Edition (ICSD-2); a member of that Committee for the 2014 ICSD-3; and is a member of the AASM Parasomnias Task Force for the ICSD-3 text revision.

Dr. Schenck and his colleague Mark W. Mahowald, M.D. received the William C. Dement Academic Achievement Award from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine in 2007 for their research on RBD and other parasomnias. They received the Sleep Research Society’s Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award in 2010 and the 2017 Sleep Science Award from the American Academy of Neurology for their discovery of RBD and its strong link with parkinsonism. He served as an associate editor of the journal Sleep from 2010-2021, and is on the editorial board of the journal Sleep Science. He has served as an expert peer reviewer for manuscripts submitted to more than 120 medical journals. His books include Paradox Lost: Midnight in the Battleground of Sleep and Dreams, and Sleep: The Mysteries, The Problems, and The Solutions. He was lead editor of the first textbook on rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder.

Dr. Schenck is a Lifetime Honorary Member of La Academia Mexicana de Neurología and Sociedad Española de Sueño. He was on the steering committee for the North America Prodromal Synucleinopathy (NAPS) Consortium, and serves on the executive board of the NAPS2 Consortium. He served as the North America representative of the World Sleep Society, and is chair of the WSS Parasomnias Task Force evaluating diagnostic procedure guidelines for REM sleep behavior disorder.