Amber Harris Bozer
Tarleton State University, TX·Neuroscience
Pain has more than one component. One is sensory: where it hurts and how strongly.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Physiology
Psychology
- Topics
pain
osteoarthritis
electroencephalography
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Identify the EEG brain-wave activity underlying the sensory part of pain by showing McGill Pain Questionnaire sensory items during a cold pressor task, in people with and without osteoarthritis knee pain.
- Identify the EEG activity underlying the emotional and motivational part of pain by showing affective McGill items during cold-induced pain, comparing people with chronic knee osteoarthritis and controls.
- Build a rigorous, cortex-wide EEG profile reporting all frequency bands, coherence and power from every electrode, using sex-matched controls, many trials and correction for multiple comparisons.
More about the research
Another is emotional and motivational: how unpleasant it feels. A third is cognitive: how a person judges and makes sense of the pain. Standard tools such as the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) measure the sensory and emotional parts. Researchers know these parts involve particular brain areas. However, no thorough, reliable picture exists of the brain-wave activity, measured by electroencephalography (EEG), behind each component. This is especially true for chronic knee osteoarthritis pain. Recent reviews have also faulted many EEG pain studies for weak methods.
Why it matters
Chronic pain affects more than 100 million Americans, and knee osteoarthritis is a common cause. A reliable map of how the brain processes the sensory and emotional parts of pain could improve our basic understanding of how pain works. It could also point to new treatment targets for people with osteoarthritis knee pain.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anson Kairys
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Compare subjective (self-reported) and objective (test-based) cognitive function between people with fibromyalgia and healthy controls, and assess how co-occurring symptoms shape the relationship between the two.
Jessica Cassidy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Neuroscience
Test whether beta-burst repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), magnetic pulses timed to the brain's 13–30 Hz movement rhythm, increases corticomuscular coherence more at a site inside the brain-muscle circuit than at a decoy site, in adults with chronic stroke.
Sharona Ben-Haim
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether self-reported post-surgical pain is linked to reduced beta-band activity in the prefrontal cortex, and whether opioid pain relief reverses it, using intracranial EEG in epilepsy-monitoring patients.
The school
Tarleton State University: 1 labs on PI Pages, $25M a year on research, 19 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.