Flavia Mancini – Neuroscience of Pain

Why studying pain?

One in 5 people, in Europe, suffer of chronic pain.

Such high incidence shows that pain is far from being a resolved problem for society, and therefore for neuroscience.

There are two main questions we need to address to find an effective solution to the problem of pain:
1. Which neural circuits do transmit noxious signals and generate the conscious experience of pain?
2. How are these circuits affected by injury and inflammation?

My research contributes to address these questions at cognitive and system level, in humans. Much of my past work has contributed to determine the neural and cognitive substrate of pain perception in healthy people. Now my main interest is to study the neural changes caused by inflammation and injury, and to understand why some people are more at risk of developing chronic pain than others.

What do I research?

Pain: sensory processing in the human brain

Who is Flavia?

It’s a rather deep question. So let me answer it only from an academic point of view.

I have a B.Sc. in Experimental Psychology and a M.Sc. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Milan. In my early days, I have studied sensory and cognitive impairments in young people with psychosis and older people with brain injuries and dementia.

I obtained a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2012. During my PhD, I have worked 2 years in Milan and 2 years at University College London, under the supervision of Giuseppe Vallar, Emanuela Bricolo, and Patrick Haggard. I have studied how what we see influence what we feel on our body.

After my PhD, I continued working at UCL under the joint supervision of Patrick Haggard and Giandomenico Iannetti for three years, and an additional year as part of the London Pain Consortium funded by a Strategic Award of the Wellcome Trust. My work aimed at investigating how the human brain encodes how much and where it hurts.

I have now joined the lab of Ben Seymour at the University of Cambridge to carry out translational work on computational neuroimaging of pain and fatigue. I am also a bye-fellow at Murray Edwards College.

Read my cv | Email me | Or watch this space.

Tweets by @mancini_flavia

Where to find me

University of Cambridge
Department of Engineering
Computational and Biological Learning Lab
Trumpington Street
Cambridge, CB2 1PZ

Get in touch

fm456@cam.ac.uk

Follow me

Twitter

News in pain research

Nature
Pain Research Forum
British Pain Society
Pain Concern