Harvard neurobiologist to give Pain Center’s Gunn-Loke Lecture

Dr. Clifford Woolf, one of the pre-eminent neurobiologists working in the field of pain, will give the 13^th annual Gunn-Loke Lecture at 5 p.m., Tuesday, Aug. 25, in room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center, followed by a reception.

Woolf, who is the Richard Kitz Professor of Anesthesia Research at Harvard Medical School, will speak on “Central Sensitization and Pain.” The lecture is sponsored by the School of Medicine and the UW Multidisciplinary Pain Center, and supported by an endowment established by Dr. and Mrs. C. Chan Gunn of Vancouver, B.C. It is free and open to the public.

Woolf is director of the Neural Plasticity Research Group in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Harvard’s medical school. He earned a medical degree in 1977 and a Ph.D. in physiology in 1979 from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1981.

He has received numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including the first Distinguished Young Investigator Award from the International Association for the Study of Pain. His research interests have focused on injury-induced changes in the way nerve synapses function, and on the role of these changes in the development of chronic pain. ¶