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To me, pain is the most endlessly fascinating topic there is to study! Pain's sensory, cognitive, and emotional facets combine to create an experience that is both universal and uniquely personal, protective and - in some cases - deeply destructive. About 1 in 5 Canadians live with chronic pain, and many chronic pain conditions are more common and more severe in women.
By combining neuroimaging, psychophysics, questionnaires & interviews, I want to answer questions such as:
How can we better understand and treat historically understudied pain conditions in women and gender diverse people, such as endometriosis, dysmenorrhea, and dyspareunia?
What role do hormones play in pain perception, e.g., in adolescents experiencing menarche and adults experiencing menopause?
How do qualitative sex & gender differences in pain processing and modulation influence one's susceptibility to and experience of chronic pain? (you can read my book chapter on sex & gender differences in pain here)
Do sex & gender affect one's response to novel pain treatments? (e.g., brain stimulation, CBT, mindfulness, virtual reality, psilocybin etc.) What role could pleasure/positive affect play in pain treatment?
My training has taught me that the most successful and impactful research:
is Patient Partnered - I first learned about the invaluable role patients can & should play in identifying research questions, study design, recruitment & dissemination in an interview with extraordinary Patient Advocates Dr. Leslie Levine and Jacques Laliberté (listen here)
has a KTT plan - ensuring the knowledge generated by your research is translated and transferred to the public (particularly the relevant patients, clinicians & policy makers) is vital to its implementation. I also just love Science Communication, see my efforts here!
Postdoctoral Researcher
Postdoctoral Researcher
Endeavor Health, PIs: Dr. Kevin Hellman & Dr. Frank Tu
Endeavor Health, PIs: Dr. Kevin Hellman & Dr. Frank Tu
I joined the Gynecology Research Laboratory for a post-doc specializing in painful periods (dysmenorrhea) and chronic pelvic pain. I'm combining neuroimaging (EEG, fMRI) with quantitative sensory testing, psychosocial, and biological data to better understand and predict pain development and treatment response in adolescents and adults.
PhD, Medical Science
PhD, Medical Science
At the Krembil Research Institute I combined neuroimaging (fMRI) and psychophysical techniques to study ascending and descending pain modulation and surgical treatment outcome in patients with chronic pain. I'm especially interested in sex-differences in pain-related brain & behavioural characteristics.
See some of the papers from my PhD below!
How does peripheral neuropathy and its treatment influence brain function? Longitudinal fMRI of people who had surgical treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome revealed reduced thalamocortical functional connectivity post-op. This may reflect central neuroplasticity in response to resolved abnormal sensory signals from the repaired peripheral nerve.
Findings summarized in this tweetorial, or read the paper here.
The sgACC has previously been associated with depression and peripheral inflammation, but what about pain? We examined this key region of the brain's descending pain modulation system. Overall, sex, age & chronic pain influenced sgACC connectivity, which also showed plasticity after treatment.
See this tweetorial for a summary or find the full paper here.
We examined functional connectivity of the sgACC in a chronic pain condition that is more common in men (ankylosing spondylitis, AS). We found sex differences that were more extensive in chronic pain vs. healthy controls, and sgACC abnormalities only in the women with AS.
Results summarized in this tweetorial, full paper available here.
MSc, Psychology
MSc, Psychology
I used fMRI in healthy participants and patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) to explore the cognitive distinction between command following and communicating using both imagined and executed motor responses. Read more here.
My experience working with DOC patients made me wonder: what if some of our non-communicative patients are experiencing pain? If so, how could we tell? It's a question I still hope to answer one day - read my article on decoding pain in DOCs here.
BSc, Biomedical Science
BSc, Biomedical Science
In my 4th year Honours thesis project I investigated the learning processes involved in acquisition of heroin self-administration in a rodent model of opioid drug addiction. I studied heroin's reinforcing properties in classical and operant conditioning models.
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