Jing Wang, MD, PhD

My research interest is centered on the role of brain circuits in the regulation of acute and chronic pain. One of our research areas is the cortical mechanisms of pain processing and regulation. We have recently found that glutamatergic projections from the prefrontal cortex to the nucleus accumbens can modulate acute and persistent postoperative pain in rodent models. We are currently performing pre-clinical and clinical investigations of pharmacological agents that alter glutamate signaling such as ketamine in postoperative pain management. We are also investigating gain control mechanisms for pain regulation in the cortex. A second area of focus in our laboratory lies in the use of computational methods to decode pain in the brain and to implement a brain-machine interface (BMI) to treat pain in real-time. We have successful decoded both the onset and intensity of acute pain in rodents using supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms, and we have constructed prototype BMIs to demonstrate its analgesic activities in rodents. We are currently working on identifying neural biomarkers for spontaneous pain and chronic pain.