Research
All students are required to engage in research activity and to develop abstracts for presentations at local, state and national meetings. Students who elect the Master of Science Degree program are expected to develop a thesis topic, design the study, work through the data collection and/or analyses, write a thesis and present their findings at a closed defense. Students are strongly encouraged to publish their work.
Orofacial Pain Research
The Orofacial Pain lab at the Center for Oral Biology is focusing on nerve injury related pains, pain modulation and its clinical application. The nervous system has the ability to either facilitate or inhibit pain. Pain, arising from external painful signals or injury, may undergo modulation in the Central Nervous System (CNS) prior to reaching the primary somatosensory cortex, thus modifying the pain experience. Faulty pain modulation mechanisms have been linked to chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, tension-type headache, musculoskeletal pain, chronic low back pain, trigeminal posttraumatic neuropathies, and irritable bowel syndrome. Exercise is a known trigger of pain modulation that has been used to evaluate pain modulation efficacy by means of an effect commonly termed Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia (EIH).
