‘Persistent pain’ is topic for Gunn-Loke Lecture

Dr. Ronald Dubner, chair of the Department of Oral and Craniofacial Biological Sciences at the University of Maryland Dental School, will give the 15th annual Gunn-Loke Lecture at 5 p.m., Tuessday, May 16, in room T-625 of the Health Sciences Center.

Dubner

He will speak on “Solving the Puzzle of Persistant Pain.” The lecture, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the School of Medicine and the UW’s Multidisciplinary Pain Center, and is supported by an endowment from Dr. and Mrs. C. Chan Gunn of Vancouver, B.C.

Dubner has been a professor and chair of the department at the University of Maryland Dental School since 1995. Previously, he was chief of the Neurobiology and Anesthesiology Branch at the National Institute of Dental Research in Bethesda, Md., from 1973 to 1995. He earned his dental degree from Columbia University in 1958 and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Michigan in 1964.

He has received numerous honors, including the John J. Bonica Lectureship (named for the late former chair of the UW Department of Anesthesiology) at the eighth World Congress on Pain in 1996, the F.W.L. Kerr Award of the American Pain Society in 1992 and the Distinguished Service Medal of the Public Health Service in 1990.

His research interests have focused on central mechanisms of persistent pain and central nervous system plasticity. He is currently co-investigator on two grants from the National Institutes of Health: “CNS Modulation of Persistent Pain and Spinal Plasticity” and “Gonadal Steroid Regulation of Persistent Pain.”