Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna H. Gray Fellowship

I was recently selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna H. Gray Fellow.

• https://www.hhmi.org/news/hhmi-commits-30-million-to-increase-diversity-in-science-with-21-hanna-gray-fellows.

I am honored and super excited to become a Fellow and thank HHMI (again!) for taking a chance with me and supporting my scientific development. This will just be a brief post highlighting (some of) what I plan to do as a Fellow and thanking those who have helped make this possible (I'll likely add to the post in the future).

♫Now, once again where is the pain? In the brain!♫ In the brain!♫ – My Fair Clinician (NAPS 2019 Film Festival, Montebello, Quebec, Canada).

As a Fellow I will delve deeper into pain under the mentorship of Prof. Allan Basbaum to study the neural and molecular mechanisms of pain. I am particularly interested in how nociceptive information (arising from noxious somatic or visceral stimuli) is encoded in the activity patterns of large neural ensembles and, critically, their relationship with, and influence on, nocifensive (protective) behaviors and pain perception. Additionally, there are still many open questions about the molecular composition of pain processing neurons along with how their proteomes respond to injury and in what ways this alters neural processing of noxious stimuli.

To unravel the neural coding principles and molecular hallmarks of pain, I am developing approaches to record neural activity (e.g., using calcium imaging or other methods) in awake, behaving animals from multiple nodes in the pain neuroaxis, including the brain and spinal cord (while pain is in the brain, nociceptive signals must get there!). I am also thrilled to collaborate with Prof. Nevan Krogan, Prof. Ruth Huttenhain, and others to dive into the world of proteomics and discover the plethora of changes that can occur in the proteome in response to noxious stimuli and injury—from alterations in protein expression to modifications of protein-protein interactions. The long-term hope is that we can use our findings to devise novel therapies and approaches to managing pain for the millions who suffer from chronic pain.

Finally, I would like to thank those who have mentored me and opened the door to many opportunities over the years. Beyond those listed (this is only the short version!), I am ever grateful for those in all the labs I've worked in along with the many colleagues who I met at conferences, summer schools, during interviews, and many other venues who have contributed to my scientific and personal development.

• Allan Basbaum and Ruth Huttenhain
• Mark Schnitzer, Gregory Scherrer, Jones Parker, and Gregory Corder
• Ian Cheong
• Vivek Jayaraman and Eugenia Chiappe
• Li-Huei Tsai and Matt Dobbin
• Fernando Ramos Quintana
• Alan Jasanoff and Yuri Matsumoto
• Matthieu Louis
• Thomas Hills and Drazen Prelec
• John Gabrieli and Nina Wickens
• Paul Rhode

Looking forward to interacting with the other Fellows and the rest of the HHMI family over the coming years!

p.s. And yes, space + neuroscience will happen!