University of Michigan HEAL PAIN Cohort Program

Modified Project Summary/Abstract Section 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. 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.