Dr. Seminowicz earned a BSc from the University of Guelph, a PhD at the University of Toronto and completed postdoctoral training at McGill University. He was faculty at University of Maryland, Baltimore, 2010-2022, Principal Research Scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia, in Sydney, 2019-2022, and joined Western in 2022. His work focuses on the cognitive aspects of pain, individual differences in the response to pain, and the consequence of chronic pain on brain structure and function.

His studies have clarified how pain-related and cognitive-related brain activity interact and how passive and active pain coping strategies affect these types of activity. His work further suggested a brain mechanism through which chronic pain might affect cognitive ability and continues testing this hypothesis in intervention studies in people with chronic pain. The clinical populations in these studies include chronic low back pain, chronic and episodic migraine, and burning mouth syndrome.

Dr. Seminowicz has also used rodent MRI to ask a question that could not easily be addressed in humans, such as how the brain changes over time from before the onset of an injury that leads to chronic pain to the time when the disease affects cognitive and affective behaviors. Ongoing studies in Dr. Seminowicz’s lab employ longitudinal designs to assess how interventions affect brain function and whether pain biomarkers can be developed. Another line of work examines the role of the claustrum in cognitive control and pain. The main techniques in his lab include quantitative sensory testing, EEG, structural and functional MRI, and simultaneous EEG-fMRI. His main funding has been from the NIH, intercampus initiatives, private foundations, and industry.

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