Stephen Gobel

I have been a basic scientist who has studied and conducted research into pain mechanisms during my professional career and I come at the problem of chronic pain from a basic scientist’s perspective. I have been a neurobiologist for all of my professional life. My education started as an undergraduate at City College of New York where my favorite course was neuroanatomy. The fact that nerve cells can line up in long chains to convey information about the world we live into our brains where it can be appreciated and acted upon fascinates me to this day. Following graduation from New York University College of Dentistry, I received training in neuroscience on a United States Public Health Service Postdoctoral Fellowship. Then as a Staff Scientist and later as a Section Chief at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I conducted basic science studies of pain pathways in the spinal cord and brain. I also have held administrative positions at the NIH that reviewed grant applications from pain scientists dealing with pain research and then with the Commonwealth of Kentucky where I administered a program dealing with spinal cord injury and head injury research.