Emmanuel Mignot is the Craig Reynolds Professor of Sleep Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Director of the Stanford Center for Narcolepsy. He is recognized as having discovered the cause of narcolepsy. Dr. Mignot was born In Paris, France, and he is a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure (Ulm, Paris, France). He received his M.D. and Ph.D. (molecular pharmacology) from Paris V and VI University respectively. He practiced medicine and Psychiatry in France for several years before serving as a visiting scholar at the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Center. He joined as faculty and Director of the Center for Narcolepsy in 1993. He was named Professor of Psychiatry in 2001. He has received numerous awards for his work, including a 2023 Breakthrough prize in Life Sciences and is a member of both the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine.

Dr. Mignot positionally cloned a mutation in the dog causing narcolepsy (hypocretin/orexin receptor 2) and discovered that narcolepsy, affecting 1/2000 people, is caused by an immune-mediated destruction of 70,000 hypocretin/orexin neurons in the hypothalamus, also revealing hypocretins as a novel critical sleep-regulatory pathway. Most of his current research focuses on the neurobiology, genetics and immunology of narcolepsy, with indirect interest in the neuroimmunology of other brain disorders such as autoimmune encephalitis or neurological paraneoplastic syndromes.

His laboratory also uses state of the art human genetics, proteomics and immunology techniques, such as genome-wide association, exome or whole genome sequencing or large scale proteomics in the study of human sleep and sleep disorders, with parallel studies in animal models. His laboratory is lastly interested in web-based assessments of sleep disorders, and conducts deep learning-based processing of polysomnography (PSG), and outcome research.