Rolf-Detlef Treede, Dr. Med., (Germany), Past President IASP

IASP Activities

IASP Member Since 1982
Councilor; Section Editor of PAIN; Chair of Committee on Committees, Audit Committee, Classification on Pain Diseases Task Force; Member of numerous committees

Professional Background

Prof. Dr. Treede’s research addresses peripheral transduction, cortical processing, pain memory and neuropathic pain. His laboratory employs a broad range of techniques in cell cultures, animals and humans. They are members of national and international research consortia, and have contributed to the development of clinical laboratory tests such as Quantitative Sensory Testing. As former NeuPSIG chair, Prof. Dr. Treede was involved in international guidelines on assessment and treatment of neuropathic pain. As former president of the German pain society DGSS, he contributed to the introduction of a chronic pain code into the German ICD-10 and to mandatory teaching of pain medicine in medical schools.

Dr. Jan Vollert is a bioinformatician with a PhD in Neurophysiology from the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on the application of statistical and computational models in pain research, mainly in Quantitative Sensory Testing. He has conducted analyses of quantitative sensory testing data of patients suffering from neuropathic pain that have been largely acknowledged in the field.

He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and its Neuropathic Pain Special Interest Group, where he works on public outreach and trainee representation. He was invited speaker at congresses of the IASP, the NeupSIG, and the European Pain Federation. He published  over 50 peer-reviewed papers, and his h-index is 16.

Dr Suellen Walker is a Reader and Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine and has worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) since 2002.

Dr Walker completed her training in both anaesthesia and pain medicine in Australia and held Consultant posts at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne and Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

She moved to London in 2001 to pursue further research related to pain and analgesia in early development. She has held a clinical academic post at UCL Institute of Child Health and GOSH since 2005.

Specialisms

Dr Walker spcialises in paediatric anaesthesia and acute and chronic pain management.

Qualifications

• 1993 FANZCA (Fellow of Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists)
• 1999 FFPMANZCA (Foundation Diplomate, Faculty of Pain Medicine, ANZCA)
• 2010 Associate Fellow, Royal College of Anaesthetists
• 2005 PhD, University of Sydney
• 2001 MSc in Neuroscience with Distinction, University College London
• 1999 MMed in Pain Medicine, University of Sydney
• 1984 MBBS (Hons), University of Melbourne

Research Interests

Dr Walker is the Research Lead for Pain in the Respiratory, Critical Care and Anaesthesia section at the UCL Institute of Child Health. Her laboratory studies evaluate age-related changes in pain response, the long-term effects of early pain and injury, and the developmental pharmacodynamics of analgesic drugs. She collaborates with scientists at UCL, University of California San Diego and University of Toronto.

She also has a clinical Sensory Testing Laboratory (within the Lung Function Unit) at the Walrus Clinical Investigation Unit at GOSH, and is involved in multi-disciplinary studies with other pain clinicians and researchers at GOSH that evaluate acute and chronic pain in children.

Dr Walker is the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Association of Paediatric Anaesthetists, Great Britain and Ireland (APAGBI), represents the APAGBI on the National Institute of Academic Anaesthesia Scientific Council, and is the Local Educational Supervisor for Advanced Pain Training at GOSH.

Lydia Coxon is a post-doc researcher in the Pain in Women and the EndoCaRe research groups at the University of Oxford. She is currently working on the Translational Research in Pelvic Pain study investigating Chronic Pelvic Pain in women using a variety of methods including questionnaires and physiological testing. Her previous work has investigated a neuropathic component to endometriosis-associated pain.

Professor Huang is a behavioral neuroscientist (also referred to as a biopsychologist). His research interests are central post-stroke pain. Future studies will examine how the spinothalamocortical pathway and its specific neurons and molecular factors (e.g., BDNF and TrKb receptors and neuroinflammatory responses) regulate pain and its comorbid symptoms, which include major depression, anxiety disorders, and memory deficits. Recently, his research has primarily focused on drug addiction. In this area, his work examines the reward comparison hypothesis for morphine, amphetamine, and alcohol. His studies have produced a substantial amount of conflicting data that challenges the reward comparison hypothesis. He has introduced the paradoxical effect hypothesis of abused drugs to explain the reward and aversion effects of abused drugs as a controlling factor in drug addiction behaviors. His third investigation involves PTSD, a critical mental illness. He is analyzing the brain's neural mechanisms for PTSD in an animal model. How the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and amygdala are involved in PTSD symptoms and how the serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine reduces PTSD symptoms in the brain are also being examined.

Dr. Paulina Scheuren is a postdoctoral fellow at the Spinal Cord Injury Center, Balgrist University Hospital in Zurich, University of Zurich in Switzerland. She recently obtained a PhD in Health Sciences and Technology/Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). Her research focuses on establishing sensitive readouts of somatosensory dysfunction related to the development of neuropathic pain by employing a multimodal phenotyping approach (i.e., multi-modal neurophysiology, quantitative sensory testing, pain-autonomic interaction).