Principal Investigator
Clifford Woolf, MB, BCh, PhD
Director, F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children’s Hospital
Professor of Neurobiology and Neurology, Harvard Medical School
Adaptive and Maladaptive Plasticity in Sensory and Motor Systems
Our lab studies how different forms of neuronal plasticity contribute both to adaptive and maladaptive changes in the mammalian nervous system in relation to pain, inflammation, regeneration and neurodegenerative diseases. We aim to develop novel therapies for neurological diseases by combining the best of academia and industry using new unbiased high throughput phenotypic approaches to identify targets and screen for novel drug candidates.
Lab Staff
Sara Hakim
PhD Candidate, Harvard Medical School
Research Focus Areas: peripheral neuroimmune interactions, neurogenic inflammation.
Research Fellows
Omer Barkai, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: neurophysiology, behavior, computational neuroscience, machine learning.
Kuchuan Chen, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: ALS, neurodegeneration, CRISPR screen.
Yu-Ting Cheng, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: in vivo multiphoton imaging, chronic pain, CNS circuit, Brain-Body interaction.
Keunjung Heo, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: neuroregeneration, neurodegeneration, ALS, assembloids, drug screening.
Aakanksha Jain, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: neuroimmune interactions, allergy, autoimmunity.
Selwyn Jayakar, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: molecular profiling of excitable cells, phenotypic screening for excitability in in vitro pain models, protein-drug interactions, neuronal excitability, synaptic function, and behavioral models of pain.
Hyoung Woo Kim, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: neuropathic pain, regeneration, nerve injury models, peripheral mechanism.
Georgios Kimourtzis, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: pain & somatosensation, cellular & molecular physiology, in vitro pain modeling, analgesic discovery.
Bruna Lenfers Turnes, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: rodent behavior, pain neurobiology, inflammation.
Roshan Pandey, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: high throughput screening, neurodegeneration, stem cells, ion channels, human iPSC- derived neurons.
Veselina Petrova, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, neurodegeneration, neuroregeneration, drug screening, in vitro pain models.
Rasheen Powell, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: ion channel scaffolding/organization, neurobiology of pain, inflammation.
Jaehoon Shim, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: ion channels, stem cells, differentiation, pain, epilepsy, high throughput screening.
Daniel Taub, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: pain neurobiology, sensory perception, somatosensory cortex.
David Yarmolinsky, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: somatosensory coding, plasticity.
Xiangsunze Zeng, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: spontaneous neuropathic pain, central sensitization, pain circuitry.
Zihe Zhang, PhD
Research Fellow
Research Focus Areas: pain neurobiology, behavior, machine learning.
Alumni
Former Graduate Students
Former Postdoctoral Fellows
Michio Painter, Harvard Medical School
David Roberson, Harvard Medical School
Andrew Snavely, Harvard Medical School
Jared Sprague, Harvard Dental School
Nesibe Temiz, Harvard Medical School
Nivanthika Wimalasena, Harvard Medical School
Zihe Zhang, Harvard Medical School
Christian Brenneis, PhD
Liam Browne, PhD
Elizabeth Buttermore, PhD
Yung-Chih Cheng, PhD
Isaac Chiu, PhD
Enrique Cobos del Moral, PhD
Michael Costigan, PhD
Shane Cronin, PhD
Simmie Foster, MD, PhD
Nader Ghasemlou, PhD
Laurel Heckman, PhD
Junwei Huang, PhD
Xuan Huang, PhD
Eric Huebner, MD, PhD
Tammy Szu-Yu Ho, PhD
Perrine Inquimbert, PhD
Andrew Kaplan, PhD
Masakazu Kotoda, MD, PhD
Cedric Laedermann, PhD
Alexandra Latini, PhD
Alban Latrémolière, PhD
Pedro Lourenço Katayama, PhD
Seungkyu Lee, PhD
Yisi Lu, PhD
Chi (Eddie) Ma, PhD
Takao Omura, MD, PhD
Inquimbert Perrine, PhD
David Roberson, PhD
Kasper Roet, PhD
Miyuki Sakuma, MD, PhD
Joachim Scholtz, MD
Corey Seehus, PhD
Rhona Seijffers, PhD
Bhagat Singh, PhD
Sebastien Talbot, PhD
Ivan Tochitsky, PhD
Christian von Hehn, MD, PhD
Brian Wainger, MD, PhD
Luke Wang, MD
Ajay Yekkirala, PhD