Over the last week we’ve been presenting our research to each other in the form of chalk talks. I found Matt Alston’s particularly interesting – he’s doing work on pain mapping in Warren Grill’s neuroengineering lab. Matt is developing a technique for quantifying pain maps from a treatment called Spinal Chord Stimulation. Spinal Chord Stimulation is a therapy proven to be effective at alleviating pain in chronic back pain patients. However, the technology is still young and the Grill Lab is working on ways to optimize the pulses being sent to the spinal chord. Specifically Matt will be refining the frequency at which the signals are sent. His day to day work involves developing a computational method – using MatLab – in order to turn the pain and paresthesia maps in a statistically significant result explaining how effective the treatment was at alleviating pain.
Matt’s presentation resonated with me because I liked the concept of the new therapy and how it was targeted toward treating a very common everyday problem – back pain. The most satisfying part of science for me is when it flows out of the lab environment and into the real world, solving everyday issues.
