The Heidelberg Pain Consortium goes into into the second funding period
On May 22, the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced their decision to continue funding the Heidelberg Pain Consortium through 2022. We are delighted to be able to continue our work on the structure-function relationships governing the development of chronic pain and explore new avenues.
In addition to the community that has developed over the first funding period, we are especially happy to have new scientists join the Heidelberg Pain Consortium, whose expertise will help us in the second funding period. These new projects will soon be covered en detail on the website, and the new PI's introduced.
In short, Frank Bradke will complement project A06 with his expertise in imaging of regenerative circuits and molecular mechanisms of structural plasticity.
Frank Kirchhoff, who is known for work on microglial biology and spinal glial circuits, Amit Agarwal, an expert on glial plasticity and astrocyte imaging in the brain, and Manuela Simonetti, an expert on neuronal plasticity in nociceptive circuits will work together in the new project A09.
Mirko Pham will pool his expertise together with those of Claudia Sommer and Nurcan Üçeyler, who have made contributions towards research on Fabry dis-ease, which is a highly painful disorder with a genetic origin in the new project A10.
Beate Ditzen, who is an expert on social neuroendocrinology, will join us as a co-PI in B02; Heike Tost, who has expertise in the analysis of the influence of environmental factors on brain circuitry, will join us along with Jonas Tesarz, who has previously examined the effects of early childhood stress on pain processing and Sebastian Wieland with his unique expertise in in vivo neural circuit analyses co-PIs in B04.
Project B10 will be joined by Rebecca Mease who has a neurocomputational background and massive expertise in this field.
The new service project, S02N will be co-headed by Katrin Schenk-Siemens, who had recently discovered and published a way for differentiating human-derived embryonic stem cells (ES cells) to mechanoreceptive human peripheral sensory neurons and Claudio Acuna Goycolea, who has strong interest and expertise in differentiating human ES cells and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) into neurons of the CNS.