To help raise awareness of the chronic pain epidemic that impacts the lives of approximately 20 precent of Americans, the Science Philanthropy Alliance and Rita Allen Foundation have collaborated on a new blog post as part of “Pain Awareness Month.” So many big questions regarding pain are unanswered. Elizabeth Christopherson,…

“One night, Jorge Lopez, my mentor in Guatemala during medical school, was playing the piano at a social gathering. While playing, he turned to me and said, ‘Can you imagine how many action potentials are triggered from my fingers and how many in your brain to interpret all this as music?’ I think that was the event that triggered my interest in understanding how the human body works,“ recalls E. Alfonso Romero-Sandoval. “After that, he was instrumental in helping me to obtain a scholarship to start my Ph.D. in Spain. My mentor in Spain, Juan Herrero, did the rest; and he showed me how to record and visualize action potentials to study pain.” Romero-Sandoval, now an associate professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, began his journey into pain research with sparks from these mentors, in medical school at Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (Guatemala) and in graduate school at Universidad de Alcalà (Spain). As a graduate student studying the biology of pain, Romero-Sandoval learned how the nociceptive system works—which is responsible for processing noxious stimuli, like injury and extreme heat or cold. “I was learning how to record neuronal activity, the electrical activity that travels from the toes to the brain to generate what we perceive as pain. I knew what this electrical activity meant and how this activity is generated at the molecular level. I had actually seen the shape of an action potential recording in my textbooks—however, when I saw a neuron's live electrical activity, that was almost magical! Seeing the electrical activity in real-time was my very first impactful research experience,” explains Romero-Sandoval.

It was in high school that Steven Prescott first held a brain in his hands. It belonged to a fetal pig that he was dissecting in a biology course, and he remembers staring at it and marveling at how the human brain, though it functions similarly to a pig brain, is capable of so much more. As he continued his education, his fascination with the inner workings of the central nervous system only deepened.

"I remember realizing when I wanted to become a scientist, after watching Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” says Ted Price, reflecting on his early-childhood watching of Carl Sagan’s award-winning PBS program. The show led Price to start reading popular-science books for kids and inspired his goal of becoming an astrophysicist. Although his parents were not scientists themselves, they supported his interests and were very engaged in his education during his childhood.

Four pioneering early-career scientists will receive support to uncover the biology of pain.

Major grants will support ten pioneering early-career biomedical scientists. The Rita Allen Foundation has named its 2019 class of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars, celebrating ten young leaders in the biomedical sciences whose research holds exceptional promise for revealing new pathways to advance human health. The selected Scholars will receive…