Google scholar profile: https://goo.gl/P4BUj3

Citations: 2307. H-index: 27. I-10-index: 35. 

I am fascinated by how the brain builds up subjective experience in health and disease. My work focuses on understanding the brain mechanisms and psychological processes that underlie pain, empathy for pain and meaning of pain, affective distress and recovery in chronic pain, depression and anxiety. For the past decade, I have been analyzing and interpreting functional brain imaging data, subjective reports of pain, emotion and thought content, and psychophysiological and behavioral responses to challenging physical and emotional stimuli. My Pain and Emotion Neuroscience Laboratory (PENLab) aims to identify brain-mind-body mechanisms that can explain pain and emotional suffering at the individual patient level. As recently appointed Assistant Professor of the Department of Anesthesiology and Director of the PENLab at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, I have extended my research in a novel and exciting direction - studying sensory, affective brain processing in adolescents with juvenile fibromyalgia and related musculoskeletal diseases, juvenile idiopathic arthritis and depression.

My research assesses the neurophysiological effects of social support and meaning of pain to change how we perceive pain, illness and suffering in ourselves and others. My studies show the strong influence of empathy on perception of pain in the self and others. I have applied computational techniques, such as support vector machines (machine learning), to identify such processes in the brain. My research also assesses the neural mechanisms associated with abnormal processing of painful, non-painful multisensory and emotional information in different chronic conditions with a central nervous system component, such as fibromyalgia. Lastly, my studies provide evidence for the underlying neural mechanisms associated with clinical response to different treatments in chronic conditions, such as osteoarthritis and recurrent major depression. This work has resulted in 40 peer-reviewed publications (some highly cited) and one registered patent. My research identifying a neurophysiologic signature of fibromyalgia was one of PAIN’s 40 most viewed papers of 2017. 

My current research focuses on identifying neural and psychological signatures of juvenile chronic pain conditions distinguishing primary pain pathologies from primary depression and anxiety and identifying their overlap. 

I have given over 20 invited talks internationally, and have contributed to bringing science closer to the public by giving out-reach talks and seminars mostly in the US. In the future, I envision bringing my laboratory and scientific activities closer to the country that helped me initiate my scientific trajectory and developing a strong pain and affective psychology and neuroscience research line in Spain.