Team Members

Jennifer Gewandter, PhD, MPH Jennifer Gewandter, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester, a former Associate Director of the ACTTION public-private partnership, and the PI of the University of Rochester Clinical Hub of the NIH-sponsored Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network (EPPIC-Net). Her research and scholarly activities are focused on optimizing the design, execution, and transparent dissemination of clinical trials for pain and peripheral neuropathy treatments as well as researching interventions for painful peripheral neuropathy. She has authored over 90 peer-reviewed publications and has served as an Associate editor for the Clinical Journal of Pain and Co-section editor for Pain Medicine. She has mentored over 30 medical students, residents, fellows, and clinical faculty in clinical research and scientific writing.

None of Dr. Gewandter’s work would be possible without her amazing team of research coordinators and administrators. 

Valerie Chiodo, BSN, RN, CCRC is currently a Lead Sr. Clinical Trials Project Manager in the lab. She holds a BSN, RN degree for 41 yrs., and is a Certified Clinical Research Coordinator since 2004. She has 34 years of clinical research experience in the areas of Cardiology, Cardiothoracic Surgery, and Translational Pain.  She has conducted drug and device studies with pharmaceutical companies, the FDA and NIH.

Rachel DeGuzman, BS is a Senior Human Subject Research Specialist. She obtained her Bachelor of Science degree from Nazareth College and majored in public health with a minor in data analytics. She has 4 years of experience conducting clinical trials for chronic pain. She has expertise in subject visits, regulatory work, and project management.

Tammy Ortiz has 22 years of experience in various aspects of clinical research administration and regulatory operations. She oversees all grant submissions, budget negotiations, financial accounting, and regulatory operations for Dr. Gewandter’s research team.  

Dr. Gewandter’s clinical trials would not be possible without the collaboration of her clinician colleagues at University of Rochester who oversee all medical aspects of the trials.

Dr. Annie Philip has been working in the URMC pain clinic for the past 18 year.  Her research focusses on identifying benefits and risks of commonly performed pain procedures to improve the quality treatment for patients in our pain clinic. She is the clinician PI of our EPPIC-Net trial for patients with osteoarthritis pain and a Co-I of our EPPIC-Net trial for patients with painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy.

Dr. Mark Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology. His areas of research interest include pharmacologic and interventional analgesic clinical trials, particularly chronic neuropathic pain conditions. Dr. Williams is the clinical site PI of our group’s EPPIC-Net study of painful diabetic neuropathy. He also serves as Co-PI with Dr. Gewandter of an adjudication committee that ensures entry criteria are met for a multi-national industry-sponsored clinical trial of a topical treatment for post-surgical neuropathic pain.

Dr. Gewandter’s team is supported by an amazing group of statisticians. These collaborators help design clinical trials and other clinical research, perform analyses, and interpret these results.

Michael McDermott, PhD is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, with joint appointments in the Department of Neurology and the Center for Health + Technology.  He has research interests in order-restricted inference, ROC curves and surfaces, missing data methods, and clinical trials methodology.  He was Director of the Statistics Ph.D. program from 1999-2022 and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.  He has 35 years of experience as a biostatistician in collaborative studies, including many large-scale clinical trials, mostly in neurological disease.  He has collaborated with Dr. Gewandter for more than 10 years, with > 30 joint publications in the area of pain research.

Eva Culakova,PhD has dedicated the last 20 years of her professional life and analytical skills to providing statistical support for oncology research, studying toxic side effects of treatments and interventions to alleviate negative effects of toxicities. She has statistical expertise in clinical trial design and analysis, and also analysis of observational studies. She was the Statistical Chair for Dr. Gewandter’s proof-of-concept clinical trial of TENS for CIPN and continues to collaborate with Dr. Gewandter on multiple secondary analyses exploring utility of different outcomes in clinical trials of neuropathic pain.

Michael Sohn, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology. His methodological research includes high-dimensional data analysis, statistical machine learning, causal mediation analysis, and metagenomics. Collaborative research interests include human microbiome studies, cancer, cancer-related cognitive impairment, and chronic pain clinical trials. Dr. Sohn helps Dr. Gewandter to teach her mentees best practices in designing and analyzing clinical research data.

Dr. Gewandter has a core group of close collaborators who greatly improve and expand her work, support her success as a woman in pain research, and expand opportunities for her mentees.

Robert Edwards, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist in the Pain Management Center in the Department of Anesthesiology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on biobehavioral aspects of acute and chronic pain. Specifically, he studies individual differences in pain responses, the neurobiological mechanisms by which psychosocial processes shape those individual differences, the impact of non-pharmacologic treatments on multimodal pain mechanisms, and the design and delivery of tailored treatments for chronic pain patients in multi-site clinical trials. One of his favorite aspects of clinical pain research is the opportunity to engage in transdisciplinary collaborations with researchers who have highly diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and areas of expertise. He has collaborated with Dr. Gewandter on multiple papers related to optimizing the design of clinical trials. Their latest collaboration is a multi-site research study aimed at determining whether a bedside quantitative sensory testing-based phenotype can be used to predict response to analgesic treatments.

Roy Freeman, MD is Professor of Neurology at the Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Autonomic and Peripheral Nerve Disorders in the Department of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. His research and clinical interests are the physiology and pathophysiology of the small nerve fibers and the autonomic nervous system.  He has over 300 publications.  He has been principal investigator on many neuropathic pain clinical trials and has been principal investigator on NIH-funded studies on the neurological complications of diabetes, on cutaneous biomarkers in neurodegenerative disease, the neurobiology of stress, on defining mechanisms that underlie neuromodulation in pain, and on sensory phenotyping in pain. Dr. Freeman and Dr. Gewandter have been collaborating for 10 years on projects related to the measurement, diagnosis, and treatment of painful distal sensory polyneuropathy. They are Co-PIs of multi-site NIH-funded clinical trial.

Paul Geha, MD has expertise in the neuroscience of pain, hedonics and feeding, and multimodal neuroimaging. His research program focuses on understanding mechanisms of neuro-adaptation in chronic pain and obesity, neural response to analgesic treatment, and brain derived long-term predictors of clinical outcomes. He and Dr. Gewandter collaborate on multiple grants and papers, leveraging their different perspectives to improve their work and initiate novel collaborations.

Dale Langford, PhD is Director of Chronic Pain Research at Hospital for Special Surgery and Associate Professor of Pain Management Research at Weill Cornell Medicine. She is a multidisciplinary pain researcher focused on interindividual differences in the experience of pain and pain research methodology, including outcome assessments and trial design. Dr. Langford is an engaged member the Analgesic, Anesthetic, and Addiction Clinical Trial Translations, Innovations, Opportunities, and Networks (ACTTION) public-private partnership, focused on optimizing outcome assessment for clinical trials of chronic pain treatments and patient engagement as research partners and diversity, equity and inclusion in pain clinical trials. She and Dr. Gewandter work closely on many projects related to clinical trial design and serve as peer mentors while navigating academic advancement as women in science.

Dr. Lynn Gautier is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Palliative Care Research in the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval, and Scientist with the Oncology Division of the Research Center of the CHU de Québec-Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada.  Her research lies at the intersection of cancer pain and aging and aims to improve cancer pain measurement and management and better elucidate a lifespan-developmental biopsychosocial model of cancer pain across the cancer trajectory. She and Dr. Gewandter have been collaborating on various projects related to chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy and providing peer mentorship related to navigating academic advancement as women in science for 10 years.

One of the best parts of Dr. Gewandter’s career is mentoring young investigators who get excited about clinical pain research or clinical trials. She has been lucky to work with extremely bright and motivated mentees.

Current Mentees

Assistant Professor:
Rob Knoerl, MD is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. He recently completed a K23 Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award from the National Institute of Nursing Research, for which Dr. Gewandter served as one of his mentors. The purpose of the K23 study was to determine mechanisms and measures of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy in adolescents and young adults receiving neurotoxic chemotherapy. Knoerl’s long-term goal is to establish a program of symptom science research focused on developing and testing the efficacy of non-pharmacological interventions to manage cancer treatment-related symptoms, such as chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. He and Dr. Gewandter continue to collaborate on multiple projects related to understanding CIPN impact on patients’ lives, treatment strategies, and measurement.

Umang Gada, MS is currently working as a biostatistician in the URCC NCORP Research Base. He received his Master of Science degree from Rochester Institute of Technology in Applied Statistics and has also previously received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Engineering from University of Mumbai. He has a combined 5 years of experience managing large datasets, performing quality checks, and conducting statistical analysis on clinical trials data. He specializes in data cleaning, consolidation and analysis utilizing various statistical tests and statistical programming software. He is working with Dr. Gewandter on developing and evaluating potential personalized outcomes for clinical trials of neuropathic pain. His future objectives include continuing to analyze data from clinical trials, particularly focusing on populations affected by cancer, while also aiming to expand his statistical expertise.

Postdoctoral fellow:
Karim Saab, MD After earning his M.D. degree from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, Karim has recently joined the lab to gain exposure to the clinical research aspect of Pain medicine. He is currently actively working on various clinical trials and on several research papers related to chronic pain and clinical trial design. Karim’s career aspirations include pursuing residency in Anesthesiology, and specializing in Pain medicine, with a commitment to contributing to the field as a physician-scientist dedicated to improving the lives of patients with chronic pain.

Residents: 
Soroush Besharat, MD, is currently a resident physician in Anesthesiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Soroush obtained his Bachelor of Science from University of Wisconsin. He developed a passion for pain research while working with Dr. Gewandter as a medical student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry and continues to work with her group on various research projects during his residency. He aspires to continue his involvement in research exploring alternative and multimodal pain therapies as a future clinician.

Remington Mark, MD is currently an Anesthesia Resident at the University of Rochester. He obtained his Doctorate in Osteopathic Medicine at LECOM Bradenton in 2021. Remington has 3 years of experience of research in acute and chronic pain and is applying for a multidisciplinary pain fellowship. He plans to practice as an interventional pain specialist in the future and has a heavy interest in opioid sparing multimodal analgesia in the perioperative setting.

Medical Students:
Jeremy Huang is currently a second-year medical student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He received his Bachelor’s of Science in Bioengineering from UCLA. Before medical school, he had 2 years of experience working in clinical research, including subject visits and project management. He is interested in integrating clinical research into his future career as an anesthesiologist.

Maddy Rangel, BS is currently a medical student at URSMD. Maddy completed her undergraduate studies in Biometry & Statistics at Cornell University. She hopes to specialize in pain research, leveraging her background to contribute to advancements in understanding and treating chronic pain conditions. She has presented her pain research work at the United States Association for the Study of Pain national meeting.

Previous Mentees:

Mahad Nistar, MD is currently a Chronic Pain Fellow at Columbia University. Mahd obtained his M.D. degree in Anesthesiology from the University of Rochester Medical Center. His clinical interests include the treatment of cancer pain and regenerative medicine while his research interests include the development of effective clinical trials. He worked on multiple projects with Dr. Gewandter when he was a resident at the University of Rochester, one of which resulted in a co-first author paper published in Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine. After fellowship, he will be joining as faculty in the Hartford Healthcare Group where he plans to continue participating in clinical research.

Soun Sheen, MD graduated from Albany Medica College and completed her residency training in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Rochester. She is currently a chronic pain fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She has worked on multiple research projects with Dr. Gewandter resulting in multiple abstracts, poster presentations, and a few manuscripts pending publication. Her clinical and research interests include cancer pain and neuromodulation, especially focused on safety and patient outcomes. She will be joining as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, where she will continue her clinical research in pain.