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Pain is complicated. The body senses this at the spot of injury and then sends information to the brain where we perceived or realize that we “feel” pain.

I have been involved in several research projects that have led me to this line of study.

Currently I am about to start the 1st year of residency in anesthesia (the doctors that put you to sleep and keep you safe  during surgery). For the past 2 years I have been finishing medical school and haven’t had a full time research job but I have been working on research in my free time.

There are 2 projects I’ve been working on during this time and 2 projects I’ve been finishing.

Studying old charts and medical records to see if a different pain medication (ketamine) improve recovery in patients after they have to have an amputation.
Asking patients about the past drug use before surgery to see if we can pick better anesthesia and pain medications to help these patients
Finishing a study to see if long-term treatment with opioids, a type of pain medication is helpful or not for patients with chronic pain
Finishing a study to see how coping (including poor coping with drug) in chronic pain can be helped by an rehabilitation program .

None of my days are very typical over the past 2 years. Every month the clinical rotation I have been in changes from surgery to pediatrics etc. My time for research has been different at different times. Most of my current research is data gathering from medical charts of study patients.  I build databases of information and then do statistics to look for answers to our research questions. Sometimes I have been able to present my research at national conferences as talks and posters.

In the past I had a job at the Cleveland Clinic where I also looked at databases, in addition to talking with and recruiting patients to be in studies. Every day I spent time at a desk and in treatment sessions with patients. Prior to that  job I was finishing my PhD spending half my time in a lab doing animal and tissue experiments. We used high powered microscopes to look at sections of the rat brain that was involved in stress and opioid addiction. We also worked to patients in opioid (heroin) addiction recovery clinics to see how their stress levels and stress hormones effected their recovery path.

I would love to have a brain and neuroscience exhibit at the Philadelphia Science Festival

I’m also in the process of setting up a monthly twitter chat between students (high school and college)  and neuroscientists to  talk about recent news articles, movies, and research in the field. Please check out my website https://kelliejaremko.com/ to get involved. Some of the money may help build this its own webpage and get the word out for people to get involved.

As part of this science outreach I would love to develop a free interactive teaching tool for high school and college professors to use to introduce neuroscience to students.