Langford, D.J., Crager, S.E., Shehzad, Z.,Smith, S.B., Sotocinal, S.G., Levenstadt, J.S., Chanda, M.L., Levitin, D.J., and Mogil, J.S.Social modulation of pain as evidence for empathy in mice.Science, 312:1967-1970, 2006.
Langford, D.J. and Mogil, J.S. Pain testing in the laboratory mouse. In: Denneman, P. (ed.) Anesthesia and Analgesia of Laboratory Animals, 2nd ed. Academy Press: New York, in press.
I am just beginning my graduate career, and excited to be a part of the Mogil lab. I am studying a phenomenon that we are calling social "contagion" pain hypersensitivity, of which a major paper has just been published.
My undergraduate honours thesis was in the area of evolutionary psychology. I investigated whether peri- and post-menopausal women were more willing to adopt children with facial asymmetry and low birth weight as a result of declining reproductive value.
During my undergraduate career I also became interested in forensic psychology. I spent three years volunteering in some of Kingston's minimum security federal prisons, socializing with inmates close to their release date in hopes of reintegrating them into society.
As an evaluator of stroke patients at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal I became interested in health research. This experience led me to seek out a lab whose research has obvious and important clinical implications--which brought me to Dr. Mogil's Pain Genetics Lab.
