Nocions : Pain research at UCLouvain

Cheers from Nocions !

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CONGRATS MARC-HENRI !
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Marc-Henri Louis publicly defended his PhD thesis in medical sciences last Thursday, December 4th, in the presence of his supervisors Anne Berquin and Valéry Legrain, as well as Séverine Henrard and André Mouraux, the jury members.
The jury also included Jenny Lewis (University of Bath, UK) and Daniel Ciampi de Andrade (Aalborg University, Denmark).
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NOCIONS ON TOUR!
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4ème Symposium francophone de Recherche sur la Douleur, Lyon 24 & 25 novembre 2025 (avec Valéry Legrain, Arnaud Steyaert, André Mouraux, Giulia Liberati, Roberta Gualdani & Marc-Henri Louis)

NOCIONS ON TOUR!
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The French Pain Research Network of the Inserm has invited several of our researchers of the UCLouvain – Université catholique de Louvain FNRS to participate in their 4th symposium, which will be held in Lyon on November 24th and 25th.

more information: https://sfrd2025.sciencesconf.org/
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WELCOME ALEXANDRA !
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Alexandra Jeandrain started a PhD thesis co-supervised by Pierre Maurage (from IPSY - UCLouvain) and Valéry Legrain thanks to an FSR grant from the UCLouvain – Université catholique de Louvain. Her work will focus on the relationship between pain and alcohol use. Specifically her project aims to better understand how chronic or heavy drinking may affect people's pain perception, and how acute pain might act as a factor that influences alcohol consumption.

visite Pierre Maurage's lab: https://www.uclep.be/labs/ARL/home
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WELCOME JAVIER!
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Javier Chávez Cerda is a biomedical engineer and former PhD student at ULB - Université libre de Bruxelles. He is now a postdoctoral researcher working with Giulia Liberati, studying new and non-invasive ways to treat pain using stimulation. His project aims to create a smart system that can sense how much pain a person might be in and automatically adjust the stimulation to match. The goal is to make pain relief more personal and effective, especially for people who can’t easily communicate their pain, such as unconscious patients or very elderly people.
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PhD THESIS DEFENSE
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On Thursday, December 4th, Marc-Henri Louis will publicly defend his PhD thesis and present his work on early diagnosis and prognosis of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.
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WELCOME GLORIA!
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Gloria Ricci started her PhD under the supervision of Giulia Liberati and André Mouraux as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) FRESCO4NoPain project. Her research explores how invasive neurostimulation (intracerebral Periodic Stimulation) in insula affects pain perception. She will combine results from animal models and recordings of brain activity in humans, to bridge the gap between preclinical studies and non-invasive neurostimulation. This work could help uncover neurostimulation mechanisms and open new opportunities for the treatment of chronic pain.

read more about the FRESCO4NoPain project: https://www.cnap.hst.aau.dk/fresco4nopain
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WELCOME MATTIA !
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Mattia Ravasio started his PhD under the supervision of Giulia Liberati and André Mouraux as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) FRESCO4NoPain project. His research aims to explore how a new form of non-invasive brain stimulation (called Temporal Interference Stimulation) can be used to reach and modulate activity in deep brain regions involved in pain perception, such as the insula. The goal of his work is to better understand how modulating brain activity can influence pain and to contribute to the development of more effective treatments.

read more about the FRESCO4NoPain project: https://www.cnap.hst.aau.dk/fresco4nopain
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CONGRATS GIULIA !
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Congratulations to Giulia Esposito who won the award for best paper at the IEEE World Haptics Conference in South Korea last July.
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WELCOME IQRA !
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Iqra Shahzad has joined Giulia Liberati’s group as a postdoctoral researcher to study the role of the insula in thermoception (sensing temperature) and social cognition (understanding social cues) in individuals with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

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