Research

How does pain reshape sleep?

I study the relationship between pain, sleep and physiological state, connecting neural circuits with measurements of brain and body.

Following a question across scales

Pain and sleep interact in everyday life. My research asks how those interactions emerge in neural activity and how we can measure them reliably.

As a postdoctoral researcher in Gregory Corder’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania, I investigate thalamocortical mechanisms of pain-related sleep disturbances. My work brings together electrophysiology, calcium imaging, sleep analysis and behaviour.

I am interested in how continuous physiological measurements capture changes during sleep, and in the limits of what those measurements can tell us.

Conceptual signals · not experimental data

My approach

Design experiments → collect aligned recordings → check data quality → quantify state-dependent changes → share methods and tools.

Research threads

From circuits to analysis.

Pain & sleepInvestigating neural circuit mechanisms of disrupted sleep.

Brain & bodyRelating cortical activity, cardiac physiology and arousal state.

Reproducible toolsMaking image and physiological data analysis accessible to other researchers.

Funded research

Turning a research question into a funded project.

NIH R21NS145093 · March 2026–February 2028

Deciphering Thalamocortical Circuit Dynamics Underlying Pain and Sleep Interactions

I conceptualized, designed and wrote the grant proposal and am listed as Essential Personnel.

Total award: $446,875
Principal investigator: Gregory Corder, PhD

Work behind these questions

All publications ↗

2026

Co-author

Heart rate and sleep history encode ultradian REM sleep timing

Current Biology · 36, 1422–1434.e5

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2024

First author

Interactive effects of pain and arousal state on heart rate and cortical activity in the mouse anterior cingulate and somatosensory cortices

Neurobiology of Pain · 15, 100157

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2025

First author

AxoDen: An Algorithm for the Automated Quantification of Axonal Density in Defined Brain Regions

eNeuro · 12, ENEURO.0233-24.2025

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Where the questions began

During my PhD with Thomas Nevian at the University of Bern, I studied neural correlates of pain and sleep using multisite electrophysiology. A research stay with Michael X Cohen at the Donders Institute deepened my approach to neural time-series analysis.

Read my doctoral thesis or visit my PhD research archive.

Let’s build the next experiment

The tools behind this work include multimodal recording software, a data processing and sleep-review workflow, and public tools for assay and activity analysis. I welcome conversations about pain and sleep research, multimodal physiology and scientific software.

Discuss a collaboration ↗