I am an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology at Queen’s University. I have been employed in the academic field in both the United Kingdom and in Canada. My work aims to understand how the brain and body interact to create the experience of pain, and why some people might be prone to develop pain while others are relatively resilient.
I am especially interested in the biological mechanisms that underlie cognitive and affective responses to pain and how this knowledge might help us treat pain. I graduated as a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at the University of Toronto, from there I continued my studies at the University of Madison-Wisconsin where I obtained my Masters of Science in Psychology, also, I obtained my Ph.D in Clinical Psychology at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. Afterwards, I held a Post-Doctoral fellowship at the Toronto Western Research Institute, specifically in the Division of Brain, Imaging and Behavior-Systems Neuroscience.
I began my academic career as a research scientist at the Toronto Western Research Institute. From there, I went to the University of Reading in England where I became an Assistant Professor, I continued my professional development at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading where I became a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow. Since October 2016 I’ve been holding the possition of Associate Professor at the University of Reading and August 2018 I became and Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at Queen’s University.
Among my most recent achievements I have secured funding from the Medical Research Council in the form of the New Investigator Research Grant, this funding will be used to research “Modulatory Capacity: Biomarkers for pain sensitization and response to psychological treatment for pain”, in this research I am the Principal Investigator. In 2018 I received funding from the charity Guarantors of Brain which focuses on promoting teaching, education and research in neurology and related clinical-academic disciplines.
I have contacted by multiple media outlets for information regarding my research, including Newsweek regarding how “Macho men are ruining science by volunteering for pain studies to show how strong they are” and “When Babies felt no pain” by The Boston Globe.