As an aspiring researcher, I aim to uncover the sensory mechanisms behind why we feel pain and how we can develop therapeutics to reduce harmful pain for everyday individuals. However, my experience working in the clinical setting as a volunteer at UPMC Presbyterian has enabled me to discover that in its most fundamental form, pain is both a sensory and emotional experience. The Health Sciences Research Fellowship offers me the ability to study pain from both a humanistic and psychological perspective. From my peers in the medical humanities, I hope to understand how emotional expression is illustrated in the histories of patient-experiences, medical care, and health literature to learn how emotions such as pain are communicated through physical expression. I am particularly interested in this concept because recent publications regarding pain assessment methods for endometrial pain have analyzed video recordings of pain behaviors in mice to rank (1-10) pain levels. In humans, this method is already used; pain assessment is done by asking patients to rate their pain from a scale of 1-10, 10 being the most severe pain a patient has experienced in their life. I am eager to discuss the concept of pain scales with my peers in the Health Sciences Research Fellowship to understand how such methods may allow for a more holistic assessment of pain in my research.

My field of research – behavioral research into pain in mice – differs from those of my peers in the Health Sciences Research Fellowship as it involves causing hypersensitivity and allodynia in mice. Due to the sensitive nature of this research, it is particularly important for research projects I propose to be thought out meticulously and carried out in an ethical manner to ensure any discomfort caused to the mice in my experiments is minimized as much as possible while still enabling me to test a specific research aim. In this sense, working with PETA and following the ethical guidelines to rodent research becomes even more critical as we seek to balance the need to avoid harm to mice with the need to perform accurate, informing research. However, my research is very similar to my peers in the sense that the data I collect serves a practical purpose in improving the health of people in the future. Specifically, my research will contribute to our understanding of the pain mechanisms that underlie chronic pain conditions for the purpose of developing non-opioid based therapeutics to alleviate chronic pain. From my peers, I am particularly interested in understanding the different roles T-cells play in mediating the inflammatory response to cancerous cells and the particular cytokines that are released in these processes. This is because my project focuses on the development of chronic pain in endometriosis, a disease in women where the tissue lying the uterus invades surrounding tissue regions, triggering an inflammatory response by the immune system similar to the response to cancerous cells. I would like to understand what types of growth factors and cytokines are present in activated T-cells in the different cancerous processes by peers are studying as these same molecules may play a role in the cascade mechanisms related to endometrial inflammation and pain.

Overall, when working across disciplines and subject fields, its important to understand that often research is described in field-specific jargon, therefore, as a pain researcher, I may have trouble understanding the work of a biochemist, and vice versa. Therefore, to overcome this barrier, it is the responsibility of all researchers to frame their work in language that is applicable not only to the precision of scientific manuscripts, but in a comprehensible form for other cross-field researchers who may stand to benefit from a new discovery of knowledge. The scientific path from a question to an answer is never clear. There is bound to be turns and changes in focus as one question is answered and two more emerge. Therefore, collaboration between researchers of different fields is essential as a project in pain research may just as quickly turn to a study of immunology as it may require the expertise of a public health expert. Collaboration with peers in different areas of focus allows for this flexibility in answering the most dire questions in research.