Paul Geha, M.D.

I have expertise in the neuroscience of pain, hedonics and feeding, and multimodal neuroimaging. I use a broad range of neuroimaging techniques, and behavioral testing to study the neurobiology of acute and chronic pain, analgesia, and obesity. My research program focuses on understanding mechanisms of neuro-adaptation in chronic pain and obesity, neural response to analgesic treatment, and brain derived long-term predictors of clinical outcomes. My current focus is mapping the brain signature of different chronic pain conditions using different imaging modalities to discover and validate these signatures. My laboratory has recently published (PNAS 2020) the first brain signature of chronic back pain that is highly reproducible across chronic back pain patients' cohorts collected in different laboratories. I have used neuroimaging and behavioral tools in cross-sectional, longitudinal and therapeutic designs to identify brain biomarkers of chronic pain and modulate these biomarkers with analgesic interventions.