Collaborations | Overview
The Bio-behavioral Pediatric Pain Laboratory is co-led by Dr. Laura Simons and Dr. Christine Sieberg within the Department of Psychiatry and Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. Their research projects focus on biological, neurological, cognitive, affective, and social risk and resiliency factors of the pain experience. Projects include animal model, brain imaging, longitudinal clinical cohort, and treatment interventions studies.
Center for Pain and the Brain (P.A.I.N. Research Group) is co-led by David Borsook, MD, PhD and Lino Becerra, PhD. Their research focuses on the discovery of novel pain pathways (Systems Biology), mapping the CNS response/s in neuropathic pain and analgesics (Biotherapeutics), developing novel high-throughput methods for evaluating analgesics (Predictive Medicine), and incorporating results from animal research into human applications (Translational Medicine). The vision of their program is to produce methods for objective evaluation of chronic pain and methods for evaluation of therapeutics.
The Commons Laboratory is led by Kathryn Commons, PhD. Her research involves a combination of neuroanatomy and behavioral pharmacology in mouse models to study the brain at the systems level. The overall goal is to understand how serotonin has the ability to influence every behavioral output.>
Dusica Bajic, MD, PhD, joined Dr. Commons' research group and became faculty member following her fellowship training in Pediatric Anesthesiology at Boston Children's Hospital. She is now a proactive clinician scientist who created a key program using infant animal models to determine how morphine acts in the developing brain that is different from that in adult for which she has received funding from the prestigious Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research (FAER). Investigation of the supraspinal mechanisms of age-dependent development of opioid tolerance is crucial to better understand the actions of opioid medications in human infants and children during surgery, critical illness or cancer treatment.
The Kohane Laboratory is led by Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD. His research focuses on drug delivery, biomaterials in general and nanomedicine in particular. This has included polymeric and other micro-particles and nanoparticles, liposomes, hydrogels, targeted particles, macroscopic devices, and combinations of the above.
The Neuroscience Statistics Laboratory,MIT, is directed by Professor Emery Brown, the primary focus of the Neuroscience Statistics Laboratory is the development of statistical methods and signal-processing algorithms for neuroscience data analysis.
The Purdon Laboratory, MGH, directed by Dr. Patrick Purdon’s, integrates neuroimaging, biomedical signal processing, and the systems neuroscience of general anesthesia and sedation.
The Franceschini Laboratory, MGH, headed by Dr. Maria Angela Franceschini focus on the development of non-invasive optical techniques including near infra-red spectroscopy (NIRS) and application in the neurosciences, neurology and brain health.