Grover and Weber Awarded Research Funding to Study Female Pain

Pulkit Grover, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Doug Weber, the Akhtar and Bhutta Professor of Mechanical Engineering, won $50,000 for research from a contest by Pitt CTSI, Magee Women's Research Institute, and the Magee-Womens Summit. The Women's Pain Research Challenge offers three $50,000 awards to be used for researching pain primarily experienced by women. The team from Carnegie Mellon will collaborate with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Anesthesiology to continue their work on patients with chronic pain due to fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia is a common, serious chronic pain condition of the central nervous system. While pharmaceutical options can be beneficial, alternative treatment is often sought due to the refractory nature of fibromyalgia, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial electrical stimulation (TES). However, pulsed TES at levels resulting in cortical responses may cause substantial scalp pain. In this study, the team optimized TES parameters to reduce scalp pain while obtaining upper and lower limb motor responses in a participant with fibromyalgia.

The Women’s Pain Research Challenge is a funding program to advance innovative solutions and diverse teams that address either physiological or psychological aspects of pain in women. This can include the dynamics of pain, causes, and alleviation of pain, and/or treatments to prevent or mitigate pain.

The Women’s Pain Research Challenge is sponsored by the Virginia Kaufman Endowment Fund, named after a prominent Pittsburgh advertising executive. It is administered by Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI) Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh.