Theodore Price (Award in Pain Recipient) completed his Ph.D. at The University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio and a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University. He took his first faculty position at the University of Arizona in 2007 and moved to UT Dallas in 2014, where he also directs the undergraduate neuroscience program and the Center for Advanced Pain Studies. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, Price’s laboratory focuses on molecular mechanisms involved in pain plasticity, with the goal of developing new therapeutics to reverse chronic pain states in humans. He has published more than 90 papers in leading journals, and has received early-career scholar awards from the American Pain Society and the International Association for the Study of Pain. Price is a member of the Somatosensory and Pain Systems Study Section of the NIH and serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including PAIN and the European Journal of Pain, where he is the pharmacology section editor.

Chronic pain is a major clinical problem that can persist for decades, but no disease-modifying treatments are available. Price’s work has focused on understanding the phenotypic changes that occur after injury that cause pain-sensing neurons to become hyperactive, driving chronic pain. His recent work has focused on how translation control signaling governs these phenotypic changes, which mRNAs are translated in an activity-dependent fashion in these neurons, and how targeting kinases that regulate translation of mRNAs can lead to disease modification resulting in long-lasting relief of chronic pain.