Core Faculty

Interdisciplinary Training Program in Biobehavioral Pain Research

Areas of Expertise

The interaction of biomedical research, behavioral/social science, and clinical research in forging the interdisciplinary study of pain and pain-related disability. Fellows will broaden their existing conceptualization of pain, incorporating a second area of expertise, to embark upon a program of integrative pain research.

Directors: Gayle Page (SON) and Jennifer Haythornthwaite (SOM)

Biomedical Research Mentors

James N. Campbell, MD
Michael J .Caterina, MD, PhD
Roger A. Johns, MD
Richard R. Meyer, MS
Beth B. Murinson, MD, PhD
Gayle G. Page, RN, DNSc
Gary S. Wand, MD

Clinical Research Mentors

Jerilyn K. Allen, RN, ScD
Joan M. Bathon, MD
Srinivasa N. Raja, MD

Jerilyn K. Allen, RN, ScD, FAAN, is Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the School of Nursing, and an expert in the design and conduct of clinical intervention research, particularly as it relates to health promotion and cardiovascular health. Additionally, her expertise and resources in connection with the Research Training in Health Disparities of Underserved Populations greatly enhances concerns regarding unequal treatment of minorities with regard to conditions with pain as a primary symptom.

Susan J. Bartlett, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology. Her research expertise relates to the impact of weight loss on medical conditions, particularly with regard to osteoarthritis of the knee, for which she received a K23 award (AR02160). The relationship of body weight gain on weight-bearing joint inflammatory pain is a natural collaborative match with Dr. Bathon.

Joan M. Bathon, MD, is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of the Arthritis Center at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. She conducts research on the inflammatory mechanisms underlying arthritis. As a mentor for the K23 awards to Dr. Robert Edwards and Dr. Susan Bartlett, both behavioral scientists, Dr. Bathon has made a significant commitment to the integration of behavioral/social science to the understanding of pain and its relief in patients with arthritis.

James N. Campbell, MD, is a Professor in the School of Medicine in the Department of Neurosurgery. As the Director of the Blaustein Pain Treatment Center, Dr. Campbell has played a pivotal role in developing the intellectual pain community at JHMI. He is renowned for his biomedical research focusing on the psychophysics of pain, nociceptor physiology, peripheral nerve injury, PET studies of mu-opiate receptors, and surgical interventions for pain.

Michael J. Caterina, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Biological Chemistry, and is the 2005 awardee of the prestigious Patrick D. Wall Young Investigator Award from the International Association for the Study of Pain. His biomedical research is focused upon the molecular basis of thermosensation and thermoregulation. His lab seeks to understand how both neuronal and nonneuronal cells detect ambient temperature changes and how such changes cause pain, pleasure, or homeostatic responses in mammals, depending upon their direction, magnitude, and anatomical location.

Robert R. Edwards, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is the recipient of a K23 to develop expertise in the research methods and data-analytic skills necessary to conduct sophisticated studies of psychosocial factors, such as catastrophizing, and the impact of these factors on pain-related outcomes, such as neuroimmunological responses to pain. The long-term goal of his research is to refine biopsychosocial models of pain and facilitate the development or enhancement of targeted psychosocial interventions for chronic arthritis pain.

James A. Fauerbach, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Medicine, Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and he holds a joint appointment in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Dr. Fauerbach’s research relates to the role of emotion in recovery from illness and injury. He is Principal Investigator of the Johns Hopkins Burn Model System. This multi-site, collaborative grant investigates major burn injury and its secondary complications, especially regarding pathways to health, function, impairment, and participation. He works extensively with cardiologists investigating depression in the setting of acute cardiac events. Of note, Dr. Fauerbach, in collaboration with Dr. Haythornthwaite, has found that catastrophizing is a significant correlate of procedure-related pain in burn injured patients (Haythornthwaite et al. 2001).

Jennifer A. Haythornthwaite, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the SOM is the Program Co-Director. Dr. Haythornthwaite is a Clinical Psychologist and conducts clinical pain research into the psychosocial factors that influence people’s adaptation to pain, particularly the impact of negative emotions and pain coping strategies on pain and pain-related disability. She has conducted studies focused on the utility of behavioral diaries to assess pain and sleep and the impact of depressive symptoms on pain and pain-related disability. Her more recent projects examine the impact of negative emotions and pain coping strategies on neuropathic pain, such as diabetic neuropathy and postherpetic neuralgia. Dr. Haythornthwaite's most recent work has focused a complex cognitive‑emotional response to pain in which the individual experiences on one specific pain coping strategy – catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is pain as intolerable, out of control, and unending. This state is consistently related to worsening pain and increases depression and other indices of suffering, but it has no consistent relationship to tissue injury generally or to particular pathologies. Her work has been instrumental in defining, conceptualizing, and understanding the impact of catastrophizing on pain and suffering in patients with burns, scleroderma, and postherpetic neuralgia. In each of these conditions – ranging from acute to chronic pain – she has shown that catastrophizing is an important factor in understanding the persistence of pain and disability related to pain. She is also currently using clinical trials to test psychological and pharmacological treatments for pain and symptom reduction in chronic illness.

Roger A. Johns, MD, is a Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine. His biomedical research focuses on two cellular and molecular aspects of pain: (1) the role of the nitric oxide (NO) guanylyl cyclase signaling pathway in mechanisms of anesthesia and analgesia, and (2) the interaction between the PSD-93/chapsyn-110 PDZ domain and NMDA receptors in central mechanisms of chronic pain and mechanisms of antinociception resulting from the deletion ofPSD-93/chapsyn-110 in chronic pain states.

Lynanne M. McGuire, PhD is an Assistant Professor at UMBC in the Department of Psychology. Dr. McGuire’s background in psychoneuroimmunology has been integrated with her developing interest in pain, culminating in the establishment of a pain sensitivity testing laboratory at UMBC equipped for the collection, maintenance and analysis of blood and oral fluids for neuroendocrine and immune responses to pain and pain treatments. As a junior faculty and recent postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Page and Haythornthwaite, and as the advisor to graduate students in psychology, Dr. McGuire brings to the Steering Committee a keen understanding of the challenges in obtaining interdisciplinary training, the issues pertaining to career development, and knowledge of current trends in graduate training in the behavioral/social sciences.

Richard R. Meyer, MS, is a Professor in the School of Medicine, Departments of Neurosurgery and Biomedical Engineering. Mr. Meyer’s primary research interest is in the peripheral neural mechanisms of neuropathic pain. He is particularly interested in how nerve injury alters the properties of primary afferent nociceptors. His research involves behavioral and psychophysical measures of pain and electrophysiological recordings from single nociceptive neurons. Mr. Meyer has a long history of collaboration with a number of biomedical pain researchers and co-directs the Neuroscience of Pain course to be included in fellows’ core coursework. Mr. Meyer Chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of the Blaustein Pain Treatment Center and oversees the review of pilot applications for Blaustein funding.

Beth B. Murinson, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Neurology. Dr. Murinson is a member of the SOM Curriculum Reform Committee and is coordinating the medical school curriculum changes related to pain. She recently received a grant from the Mayday Foundation that provides support for developing and evaluating a new medical school curriculum that improves the students’ knowledge of pain and its treatment. She has studied medical education at both University College London and JHU. Dr. Murinson is a gifted and innovative educator who will facilitate the involvement of fellows in the range of educational resources and experiences.

Gayle G. Page, RN, DNSc, FAAN, Professor, Independence Foundation Chair in Nursing Education, and Director of the Center for Nursing Research is the Program Co-Director. Dr. Page conducts biobehavioral studies investigating the metastatic, immune and neuroendocrine consequences of perioperative pain, and more recently, the impact of early postnatal pain on responses to both painful and nonpainful stress in the mature animal.

Srinivasa N. Raja, MD is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and is the Director of Pain Research in the Division of Pain Medicine. He has conducted NIH-funded basic science and clinical research aimed at understanding the mechanisms of neuropathic pain past 15 years. In particular, his studies have used various animal models of neuropathic pain to understand the role of specific receptor systems such as the NK-1 receptor, mu-opioid receptors, and peripheral adrenoceptor mechanisms in neuropathic pain states. He has also been interested in the role of complementary and alternative therapies in cancer pain with studies showing an antihyperalgesic effect of soy in inflammatory, neuropathic and cancer pain models in rodents. Dr. Raja has also conducted controlled clinical trials to examine the efficacy of opioids, tricyclic antidepressants and sodium channel blockers in neuropathic pain states such as postherpetic neuralgia and postamputation pain.

Michael T. Smith, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Smith is a clinical psychologist, certified in behavioral sleep medicine, and brings expertise in sleep disorders research and cognitive-behavioral approaches to clinical pain assessment and management to the training program. His research focuses on the neurobehavioral causes, consequences, and treatments of insomnia and sleep loss, particularly as these problems relate to chronic pain. His current research projects include: 1) studying the effects of sleep deprivation on central pain processing (sponsored by NIH-NINDS), 2) evaluating how sleep disturbance effects the clinical trajectory of chronic myofascial pain associated with temporomandibular joint disorders (sponsored by NIH-NINDS), 3) a clinical trial of the benzodiazepine receptor agonist, eszopliclone (Lunesta) in patients with new osteoarthritis of the knee (Sponsored by Sepracor, Inc), and 4) a pilot fMRI project evaluating how sleep deprivation alters functional neuroanatomic processing of pain in healthy subjects.

Gary S. Wand, MD, is Professor of Medicine in the School of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology. In addition to his extensive research on alcohol, Dr. Wand studies the genetic mechanisms that control hypothalamic pituitary adrenal responses to stressful stimuli. He recently showed that a T1521C polymorphism of the GABA(A) alpha6 receptor subunit gene was associated with specific personality characteristics as well as a marked attenuation in hormonal and blood pressure responses to psychological stress.

Stephen T. Wegener, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Medicine Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Dr. Wegener is interested in the use of self-management interventions to reduce pain and pain-related disability among individuals with pain following a spinal cord injury, post-amputation pain, and pain following a severe lower extremity injury. He is currently conducting two clinical trials evaluating group and computer assisted self-management in persons with lower limb trauma and amputations. In conducting a clinical trial for pain management using opioid treatments, Drs. Haythornthwaite and Wegener have found that patients who experience chronic pain evaluate treatments differently and are less willing to pursue certain types of medical treatments and more willing to pursue non-pharmacological treatments for chronic pain (Haythornthwaite et al. 2003).