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NPP Seminar: Professor Maria Fitzgerald, UCL
17 May 2023, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm
Title: ‘Building healthy pain connections in the infant brain’
Event Information
Open to
- All | UCL staff | UCL students | UCL alumni
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Charlette Bent-Gayle
Location
-
Medical Sciences 131 A V Hill LTMedical Sciences and AnatomyGower StreetLondonWC1E 6BT
Academic Host: Josef Kittler
Abstract: Newborn mammals display robust reflex responses to noxious or tissue-damaging stimulation, but the unique sensation of pain and its unpleasant, threatening quality requires functional connections in the cortical and subcortical regions of the brain. I will present our recent research on the maturation of pain processing in the young mammalian brain, drawing on data from human infants and laboratory rodent pups, and show that the cortical pathways underlying adult pain experience are shaped by events in infancy
About the Speaker
Professor Maria Fitzgerald
Professor of Developmental Neurobiology at UCL, Neuroscience, Physiology, Pharmacology
The Fitzgerald lab at UCL is internationally recognised for pioneering work in the basic developmental neurobiology of pain and is a world leader in science of pain in infants and children.
Maria Fitzgerald graduated in Physiological Sciences at Oxford University and studied for a PhD in Physiology at UCL. She was awarded a postdoctoral MRC training fellowship to work with Professor Patrick Wall in the Cerebral Functions Group at UCL and remained in that group as a postdoctoral fellow until starting her own research group. She became a Professor of Developmental Neurobiology at UCL in 1995.
Maria was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2000 and was awarded the Jeffrey Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children's Pain Relief by the American Pain Society, in 2010. She was elected to the Royal Society of Anaesthetists Faculty of Pain Medicine in 2013 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016.
She is currently and has been a member of numerous strategic and research panels including the Medical Research Council Neurosciences and Mental Health Board, the UK Research Assessment Exercise (REF) and the Council of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
More about Professor Maria Fitzgerald