PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT
We feel that the Department of Anesthesiology and the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center (CPFRC)
at the University of Michigan (UM) would be ideally positioned to be a part of the HEAL PAIN Cohort Program.
We already have established inter-disciplinary partnerships with investigative teams at UM and beyond who
work in nearly all of the disciplines listed in the FOA including engineering, social sciences, epidemiology,
biostatistics, computer sciences, bioengineering, addiction medicine, public health, and or mental
health/behavioral health. Our core CPFRC faculty share this inter-disciplinary diversity. Amongst our 11 core
faculty we only have one physician; we have three pain psychologists, two neuroscientists, a
psychoneuroimmunologist, a social scientist, an epidemiologist, an environmental health scientist turned
cannabis and psychedelic researcher, and a social worker turned neuroscientist (Baker). However we do not
currently have a post-doctoral training grant specifically designed to support and train the next generation of
inter-disciplinary post-doctoral clinical pain researchers.
Our proposed University of Michigan (UM) HEAL Initiative® Partnership to Advance INterdisciplinary (PAIN)
Training in Clinical Pain Research (the UM HEAL PAIN Cohort T90/R90) will support interdisciplinary
postdoctoral training to promote the next generation of independent clinical pain researchers. We feel that the
proposed UM HEAL PAIN Cohort Program can provide exemplary training in six of ten HEAL content areas,
including: chronic overlapping pain conditions; effective interventions for pain and co-morbidities; non-opioid
pharmacological treatments for pain; nonpharmacological interventions for pain; pain across the lifespan;
prevention of the transition from acute to chronic pain; and bioinformatics. We also feel that our program
mentors can provide clinical pain research training in several fields that have not historically been well
represented in pain research including engineering; social sciences; epidemiology; biostatistics; computer
sciences; addiction medicine; public health; and mental health/behavioral health.
Although we have identified and named five mentors who are established pain researchers and five others in
the under-represented fields, UM has a vast number of established pain researchers and mentors at various
points in their career that are not accustomed to receiving effort to mentor. Those non-named UM faculty will
augment the mentors named in the grant, to enable us to assign each trainee both a junior and senior mentor,
since we feel they often bring different perspectives. We also are using departmental support of the CPFRC
Health Equity Core and its many patient partners with lived experience. We will also assign each trainee a
person with lived experience to be part of their mentoring team. The curriculum and evaluation programs for
this program are built upon several very successful T32 and K-12 program, including our HEAL Pain K-12.