Bruno Minotti is an emergency physician and researcher focused on pain assessment and management in the emergency department. His work centers on patient-reported outcomes and strategies to improve the recognition and treatment of acute pain in clinical practice. He is particularly interested in bridging research and bedside care, developing practical approaches that ensure patients’ pain is systematically assessed and effectively addressed. Through his work, he aims to enhance both patient experience and clinical decision-making in acute care settings.

Outline:

Pain Assessment in the Emergency Department: In the emergency department, unidimensional pain scales such as the numerical rating scale are frequently used to assess pain. While these tools can track changes in an individual patient’s pain over time, their correlation with analgesic requirements and clinical outcomes is limited. In this presentation we will discuss the following questions: What is the information we truly gain from these scores? What is the overall meaning of pain for patients in the emergency setting? What do we really need? 

A/Prof Hughes is an emergency nurse academic whose work focuses on improving pain care for adults presenting to the emergency department. He is currently the Head of the Nursing Discipline at The University of Queensland, where his teaching and supervision focus on emergency nursing, pain assessment and management, and complex adult care. Clinically, A/Prof Hughes has extensive experience in some of Australia’s busiest emergency departments, informing a research program that addresses both individual patient outcomes and system-level processes such as workload, patient flow, and short-stay models of care. His research consistently explores how organisational factors, documentation practices, and cognitive impairment influence the quality and timeliness of pain management in emergency settings. A/Prof Hughes has co-authored key studies examining best-practice pain management interventions in the emergency department, including cluster-randomised trials of multifaceted educational and systems strategies to improve analgesic practices. He has pioneered deep learning approaches to identifying patients presenting to the emergency department in pain. More recent work has investigated population-level trends among patients presenting to the emergency department with pain and the treatment they receive. Across his scholarship, A/Prof Hughes promotes nurse-led research, the use of nurses as data collectors in real-world emergency settings, and the translation of evidence into pragmatic workflow and clinical decisionmaking changes.

Outline of Webinar

A/Prof Hughes will outline the issues in identifying patients presenting to the emergency department in pain in large retrospective datasets and how the application of deep learning can overcome some of these limitations. He will then discuss the use of this technology to identify key aspects of pain prevalence and treatment in the emergency department. Drawing on his work with larger datasets, he will identify how factors such as personal and social demographics, multimorbidity, and the emergency department environment can influence the provision, speed, and outcomes of pain care in the emergency department.

Santi Di Pietro is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pavia and consultant in Emergency Medicine at San Matteo University Hospital (Pavia, Italy).

Dr Di Pietro set up and leads the research group RAEM (Regional anaesthesia in Emergency Medicine), which  conducts studies on the use of nerve blocks for pain management in the acute care setting.   In his presentation, he will provide an overview of regional anaesthesia applications in the acute setting, with a focus on recent advances, future perspectives and controversies.   

Joletta is a fierce advocate for the integration of lived experience into the research, study, and treatment of pain. She came to this work through her own experiences of living with chronic pain and struggling to find adequate care, resources, and support after an on-the-job injury as a firefighter. She began writing a blog to try and make sense of things, which led to invitations to speak at conferences and to partner in pain research, education, and publishing. 

She was invited to a meeting at the 2018 World Congress on Pain to discuss how IASP could meaningfully integrate lived experience into its work. In 2019, the Presidential Task Force that became the Global Alliance of Partners for Pain Advocacy (GAPPA) was formed, and Joletta became the founding Co-Chair with Blair. She currently serves as GAPPA Past Co-chair. 

Blair H. Smith MD, FRSE, Professor of Population Health Science at the University of Dundee (Scotland), recently also retired as Consultant in Pain Medicine. Graduating at the Universities of Glasgow (MBChB, 1987) and Aberdeen (MEd Distinction 1998; MD 2000), he held an NHS Primary Care Career Scientist Award (2000 to 2005) and was Professor of Primary Care Medicine at the University of Aberdeen until 2011 before taking up his current post.

His research on chronic pain and neuropathic pain has been published widely, specifically studying its epidemiology, genetics, primary care management and self-management. He has published >320 peer-reviewed research papers, various book chapters and reports, and two volumes of poetry. He has been listed in the Web of Science as a “highly cited researcher” (top 0.1% globally) from 2020 to 2024 (Scopus h-Index 88), and has been (co-)investigator on research grants totalling >£28.3M. In 2025 he was given biennial the Lady Margaret MacLellan Award for outstanding contribution to medical research in Scotland. He was a founding Co-Chair of GAPPA, with Joletta and continues to serve as Past Co-Chair.

Dawn Marie Gibson is a former youth and young adult lay chaplain turned artist, organizer, and citizen lepidopterist. Before joining the National Pain Advocacy Center's leadership she led the Spoonie Chat Twitter community, supporting her fellow spondyloarthritis and fibromyalgia folks and other chronic pain patients through health social media, media availability, and policy advocacy centering the lived experience of patients and the people who love them.

She has extensive family caregiving experience in medical and surgical oncology, dementia, and end-of-life care. She lives in Michigan with her family and a cadre of hand-raised butterflies. 

Since 2014, Dr. Serra has been a Consultant in Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology at King’s College Hospital, London. Jordi Serra received his medical degree in 1988 from the University of Barcelona and completed his Neurology specialty in 1992 in Barcelona. He spent following years (1992 – 1995) as a Neuromuscular Fellow at the Neuromuscular Unit, Good Samaritan Hospital and Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, Oregon, USA, where he specialized in the study, diagnosis and treatment of neuropathic pain patients.

During this period, he was trained in the technique of microneurography. Microneurography offers an unrivaled tool to study spontaneous pain in humans by producing objective records of the abnormal nerve impulse activity responsible for paresthesia (myelinated fibers) and spontaneous pain (unmyelinated fibers). This is the only available technique to detect and quantify positive sensory phenomena of peripheral nerve origin in humans by recording individual action potentials from single sensory fibers.

Dr. Serra’s pioneering work on the recording of abnormal spontaneous activity in C-nociceptors from patients and animal models of neuropathic pain is widely cited in medical literature. Currently, he is researching the correlation of peripheral nociceptor spontaneous activity as seen in patients with the perceptual experience of ongoing pain.

Dr. Serra’s expertise also lies in the areas of electromyography, nerve conduction studies, evoked potentials, quantitative sensory testing, thermography, and intraoperative electrophysiological monitoring.

He cofounded both the Pain section of the American Academy of Neurology and the Neuropathic Pain Group of the Spanish Society of Neurology, where he served as the first Chairman. He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), the British Society of Clinical Neurophysiology, the Spanish Society of Neurology, and the Spanish Pain Society.

Dr. Serra has authored many scientific journal articles and book chapters. He is a frequently invited speaker and organizes courses on neuropathic pain. He also serves as a reviewer for several scientific journals.

Manuela Schmidt completed her PhD at the International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences in Göttingen (Germany) in 2006. She subsequently joined the laboratory of Prof. Ardem Patapoutian at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, where she investigated TRP and Piezo2 ion channels. She went on to establish an Emmy Noether-funded research group at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen, focusing on the systems biology of pain. In 2020, she was appointed Full Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Vienna, where she also serves as Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Life Sciences.

Theodore (Ted) Price is Ashbel Smith Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is the Director of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies. Ted did his PhD with Ken Hargreaves at UT Health San Antonio and his postdoc with Fernando Cervero at McGill. Ted started his independent lab in 2007 at the University of Arizona and moved to UT Dallas in 2014. Ted’s lab’s goal is to identify molecular mechanisms causing chronic pain with emphasis on developing new drugs to treat pain. His lab’s focus is on human molecular neuroscience with specialization in the dorsal root ganglion and spinal dorsal horn. Ted has published more than 250 peer-reviewed studies and has been continuously funded by NIH for more than 15 years. He is a co-founder of many companies, including 4E Therapeutics.

Angelika Lampert, MD, is the Director of the Institute of Neurophysiology at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. She coordinates the Sodium Channel Network Aachen and serves as speaker of the Scientific Center for Neuropathic Pain Aachen (SCNAACHEN), focusing on inherited neuropathic pain syndromes such as small fiber neuropathy linked to sodium channel mutations. Her research emphasizes translational basic science, including patient-derived stem cells, Patch-Seq, sodium channel biophysics, and pharmacology. Angelika is co-chair of the IASP Global Year 2026 on Neuropathic Pain. 

Daniela Maria Menichella, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Pharmacology at Northwestern University in Chicago. She directs the Peripheral Neuropathy Multidisciplinary Clinic and the Charcot-Marie-Tooth Association Center for Excellence. Dr. Menichella provides care for patients suffering from neuropathic pain due to peripheral neuropathy. In addition to her clinical work, she is actively involved in basic and translational research and takes part in NIH NeuroNext and NIH HEAL EPICC clinical trials. Her research focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underlie neuropathic pain and axonal degeneration in both hereditary and acquired peripheral neuropathies, with a particular emphasis on painful diabetic neuropathy. Her laboratory utilizes an integrated approach that combines pain behavioral testing, electrophysiology, in vitro and in vivo calcium imaging, confocal microscopy, chemogenetics, and single-cell RNA sequencing, using conditional and transgenic mouse models. Recently, her lab has begun to validate therapeutic targets using human tissue, such as dorsal root ganglia (DRG) and skin biopsies from patients with well-characterized painful peripheral neuropathies. 

Diana Tavares Ferreira, PharmD, MS, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Dallas. She earned her PharmD and MS degrees from the University of Coimbra and completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, followed by postdoctoral training at UT Dallas. 

Her research focuses on axonal transport, RNA regulation, and plasticity in neurodegeneration, peripheral neuropathies, and chronic pain. She employs a broad range of omics, experimental, and computational approaches to investigate mechanisms underlying nervous system dysfunction. 

Patrick Dougherty, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Pain Medicine–Research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. 

Throughout his career, his research has focused on understanding the neurochemical and physiological consequences of peripheral nerve injury and inflammation on central nervous system activity. His laboratory’s recent work centers on elucidating the mechanisms of pain in cancer patients, with the goal of identifying interventions for chemotherapy‑induced neuropathic pain and cancer‑related hyperalgesia. This work includes complementary clinical and preclinical studies, combining quantitative sensory testing with skin biopsy to define the specific sensory nerve fibers involved in chronic chemoneuropathy.

His research was among the first to demonstrate that cancer itself can contribute to neuropathy prior to treatment and that pre‑existing differences in distal innervation influence pain vulnerability. More recent studies have characterized anatomic, physiological, and transcriptomic changes in human dorsal root ganglia associated with neuropathic pain, revealing sexually dimorphic molecular mechanisms underlying ectopic neuronal activity and persistent pain. 

Dr. Melissa Pielech is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, person with lived experience with pediatric chronic pain, and Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health and Warren Alpert Medical School. Over the past 10 years, Dr. Pielech has developed unique cross-cutting expertise in the etiology, co-occurrence, and treatment of both pain and substance use behaviors in adolescents and young adults. Her National Institutes of Health funded program of research focuses on: 1) patient-centered development and evaluation of interventions co-addressing pain and substance use, 2) addressing barriers to family involvement in youth substance use disorder treatment 3) pediatric opioid stewardship, and 4) increasing integration of substance use interventions in pediatric integrated care settings. Dr Pielech also provides clinical services to youth with substance use disorders at the Bradley Vista Intensive Outpatient Program as well as youth with persistent pain and somatic symptoms at Hasbro Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Ryan Wexler is a naturopathic physician-scientist and Assistant Professor at the National University of Natural Medicine whose research focuses on improving care for individuals with chronic low back pain and radiculopathy. His work integrates movement, mindfulness, and motivational approaches within multicomponent interventions. As a clinical trialist, he uses methods including wearable technology, quantitative sensory testing, motion analysis, and mixed methods to assess intervention outcomes. Dr. Wexler also collaborates with people with lived experience to ensure his interventions are relevant to real-world clinical care and patient priorities. 

Dr. Amanda Stone is an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and a licensed clinical psychologist. Dr. Stone’s research has largely focused on parent-child dynamics surrounding pediatric pain and has been funded by a NIH K23 award as well as IASP Early Career Research Grant. Dr. Stone is an active participant in USASP and served as a founding co-chair of the Pediatric Pain SIG and is a current member of the PWLE Committee. Dr. Stone also has clinical experience providing care for individuals with chronic pain and co-occurring mental health disorders across the lifespan. Dr. Stone will be presenting virtually today due to a last-minute family emergency.

Dr. Michael “Alec” Owens is a Clinical Psychologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Owens’ research focuses on exploring the intersection of pain and sleep among people living with chronic pain. Additionally, his research has branched out to include substance use including cannabis and its impact on symptom management.. The ultimate goal of Dr. Owens’ research is to elucidate health disparities, exploring mechanisms and novel interventions. Dr. Owens is also the Director of the Chronic Pain Psychology Clinic at UAB and a current co-chair of the Sleep and Pain SIG at USASP. 

Dr. De’Sha Wolf is a Social Scientist and Research Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Portland State University. Her research niche focuses on identifying community-based solutions for young Black adults living with chronic pain using integrative medicine strategies. She is a K01 award recipient with funding from NCCIH to adapt the evidence-based Chronic Pain Self-Management Program for young Black adults in collaboration with patient, provider, and community partners. Dr. Wolf also serves as Co-Director of the Oregon Health & Science University CONNECT program, an evidence-based near-peer mentorship program supporting postdocs and early career faculty pursuing health research careers.

Michael S. Gold, Ph.D., is a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Gold received his B.A. from UC Berkeley, Ph.D. from UCLA, and was postdoctoral fellow with Jon Levine at USCF.  The focus of Dr. Gold’s research is the neurobiology of pain.  He has made important contributions to injury-induced plasticity in nociceptive afferents, and their contribution to the manifestation of persistent pain. Toward this end, he has employed an array of approaches ranging from the study of isolated cells to the development of novel behavioral assays with which to assess the presence of persistent hypersensitivity, and more recently the study of clinical populations suffering from persistent pain. Dr. Gold is actively involved in the greater pain community most recently working to form the US Association for the Study of Pain.

Hana is a dedicated researcher focused on improving paediatric pain management during vaccinations. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, Australia, specialising in strategies to reduce vaccination-related pain in young children, particularly those under two years of age.

With a background in paediatric healthcare, her work aims to improve the clinical experience of young patients and reduce fear and distress associated with medical procedures. She is committed to advancing evidence-based practice and supporting the integration of effective and innovative pain-management strategies into routine clinical care.

Her research contributes to both the academic literature and practical guidance for healthcare providers and families. Hana is a strong advocate for child health and wellbeing and is dedicated to promoting compassionate, developmentally appropriate approaches to paediatric care.

Dr. Josep Roman-Juan is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester working under the mentorship of Dr. Anna Hood and co-supervised by Dr. Melanie Noel at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on understanding the early roots of chronic pain in childhood and adolescence through an international, intersectional, and interdisciplinary lens.

Dr. Roman-Juan holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of the Balearic Islands and earned his PhD in Psychology from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, graduating cum laude and receiving the university’s Extraordinary Doctorate Award.

He is the recipient of the John J. Bonica Trainee Fellowship from the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and previously held the PICH Louise and Alan Edwards Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Calgary.

Mica Marbil is a PhD student in the Clinical Psychology program at the University of Calgary. She is supervised by Dr. Katie Birnie and is a trainee in the Partnering for Pain research program. Mica’s research focuses on the systemic inequities in pediatric chronic pain assessment, treatment, and outcomes. Through her work, she aims to address the health disparities that influence pain in marginalized populations. Mica’s research is currently supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Sophie Crouch is a PhD candidate at Adelaide University, supervised by Dr. Sarah Wallwork and Prof. Sue Nichols. Her research aims to investigate how children may learn about pain and injury through the media they consume (e.g., popular children’s YouTube videos). This has involved conducting content and narrative analyses of YouTube videos popular with children aged ~4-12 years and investigating how children interpret and make meaning from this content.  

Sophie completed a Bachelor of Psychology (Advanced) (Honours) at The University of Adelaide in 2023 and continues to explore her interests in Health Psychology through her PhD studies.