Plenary Speakers

Cameron Young
Cameron Young is a college freshman who has experienced chronic pain for his entire life. In the past few years, he’s become an outspoken advocate for the disabled community, and he is very passionate about disability and LGBTQ rights and the intersections between them. Guided by his experiences as a disabled person and what he’s learned from years of advocacy within the disabled community, he is excited to speak at this conference and share what he’s learned with you all.

 

 

Theodore Price, PhD I Center for Advanced Pain Studies, UT Dallas 
Theodore (Ted) Price is Ashbel Smith Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at University of Texas at Dallas where 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 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 on dorsal root ganglion and spinal dorsal horn. Ted has published more than 200 peer reviewed studies, and has been continuously funded by NIH for more than 15 years. He is co-founder of many companies, including 4E Therapeutics.

Luana Colloca, MD, PhD I University of Maryland
Dr. Luana Colloca is an MPower Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the Director of the Placebo Beyond Opinion Center at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Dr. Colloca holds an MD, a Master’s degree in Bioethics, and a PhD in Neuroscience. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and a senior research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA.

Dr. Colloca has conducted studies on the behavioral, neural, and pharmacological mechanisms of pain modulation related to placebo and nocebo effects. Her lab has also developed an interest in virtual reality as a non-pharmacological approach to relieving pain and other symptoms. She has published in top-ranked international journals, including Biological Psychiatry, Annual Reviews of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Nature Reviews Rheumatology, Pain, Nature Neuroscience, JAMA, The Lancet Neurology, Science, and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Her research has been cited over 19,200 times (H-index 64) and has been featured in National Geographic, The New Scientist, The Washington Post, Science Daily, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, Nature, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, and USA Today.

Dr. Colloca has received the Dubner and Patrick Wall awards from the International Association for the Study of Pain and the UMB 2024 Researcher of the Year award, among others. She is committed to science dissemination, including podcasts (one with Jason Alexander of Seinfeld) and a TEDx talk.


Beth Darnall, PhD I Stanford University 
Beth Darnall, PhD is Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and Director of the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab. A psychologist-scientist, she leads NIH and PCORI-funded national studies that on scalable behavioral analgesic interventions and patient-centered opioid reduction. 

Her work centers on developing, investigating and disseminating solutions that offer more equitable access to evidence-based behavioral pain care for diverse and underserved populations. She created Empowered Relief® a 1-session group intervention that rapidly equips individuals with effective pain relief skills for acute, chronic, and post-surgical pain. Empowered Relief® is being delivered by certified instructors in 29 countries and in 8 languages.

She has three times briefed the U.S. Congress and the FDA on patient-centered pain care and opioid stewardship. She is a scientific member of the NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee, served on the CDC Opioid Workgroup (2021), is Chief Science Advisor for AppliedVR, and is author of four books for patients and clinicians. She has keynoted national pain society conferences in Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.K. In 2018 she spoke on the psychology of pain relief at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Stanford Faculty Profile and full CV: https://profiles.stanford.edu/beth-darnall

Twitter: @bethdarnall