Prof. Anna Maria Aloisi was born in Montalcino (Siena), Italy, in 1960, took the degree in Medicine at Siena University in 1985 and spent all her academic career in the Institute of Human Physiology at the University of Siena. Her research activity is characterized by a continuous interaction with many national and international groups and was focused on the study of pain mechanisms with particular attention on the sex differences in the pain-induced responses and on the role of gonadal hormone-induced effects in pain mechanisms in humans and rodents. Her further interest is on the role of the limbic system in behavior.

Lars Arendt-Nielsen has been engaged in pain research, pain education, and pain policy for more than 30 years and worked at various institutions around the world. Founder and director of Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Aalborg University, Denmark, with 80+ researchers and Ph.D. students employed. Published more than 900 peer-reviewed papers on translational, experimental, and clinical pain research. Collaborating with over 20 pain research centers and clinics around the world. A keen interest has been to support pain patient organizations in their efforts to help their members to be recognized by political and health care systems. Knighted by the Danish Queen for the contribution to science.

Marshall Devor was born in Toronto, Canada in 1949. His AB and PhD degrees were from Princeton University (1970) and MIT (1975). He was a postdoctoral fellow with the pain research pioneer Prof. P.D. Wall at University College London and later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (HUJI). He joined the HUJI faculty as Research Associate in 1977 and rose to the rank of Professor in 1988. He served as Department Chairman (3 terms) and in a number of other University, national and international roles. He has contributed considerably to the understanding of the physiological basis of neuropathic pain and more recently to mechanisms involved in loss of consciousness and pain-free surgery.

Robert Gereau is the Dr. Seymour and Rose T. Brown Professor of Anesthesiology, and serves as Director of the Washington University Pain Center. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from Missouri State University, and a PhD in Neuroscience from Emory University (1995). Following postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute (1998), he took a faculty position in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, serving as Assistant and Associate Professor until 2004, when he was recruited to Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Gereau’s laboratory utilizes a combination of electrophysiology, optogenetics, and molecular approaches to understand mechanisms of maladaptive plasticity underlying the development of chronic pain. These studies include development of new enabling technologies for wireless measurement and manipulation of neural function. The lab also conducts translational research, including comparative studies of human and animal physiology, as well as healthy human volunteer studies aimed at establishing proof of concept for novel therapies.

Patrick Haggard leads the Action and Body Research Group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.

William Maixner received his PhD and DDS degrees from the University of Iowa, where he also completed a 2-year Fellowship before being appointed Staff Fellow and Pharmacology Research Associate at the NIH. He joined the Dental School faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1985, rising through the academic ranks from Assistant Professor to Distinguished University Professor and serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 1999-2005, when he was named Director of the Center for Pain Research and Innovation. He joined Duke University in January 2016 as Director of the Center for Translational Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology. An expert in the pain field, Dr. Maixner has published widely in basic pain mechanisms, neuronal pain coding properties, pharmacology of opioids, gender differences in pain perception, and human pain genetics. His Duke program focuses on translating laboratory and clinical findings into novel diagnostics and therapeutics to prevent or alleviate chronic pain.

Tamar Makin is a neuroscientist at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Her main interest is in understanding how changed behavior, such as prosthetic limb usage, drives brain reorganisation. For this purpose, she integrates methods from the fields of neuroscience, experimental psychology and rehabilitation. Her primary model for this work is studying individuals with a hand loss.

Camilla I. Svensson received a Master of Science in Pharmacy from Uppsala University, Sweden, and then pursued her pre-doctoral work in USA at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) on spinal mechanisms of pain transmission. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular Pathology from UCSD 2005 and then undertook post-doctoral work centered on inhibitory regulation of intracellular signaling in rheumatoid arthritis at the Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology at UCSD. Dr. Svensson started her laboratory at the Karolinska Institutet, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology in 2009, where she today is a group leader and Associate Professor (and Wallenberg Academy Fellow and Ragnar Söderberg Fellow in Medicine) leading a research team exploring pain mechanisms in rheumatic disease, with a specific focus on the role of antibodies and associated inflammatory and non-inflammatory processes as well as glial cells in peripheral and spinal pain signal transmission.

Manfred Zimmermann is an Emeritus Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Following studies of physics and biophysics Manfred received degrees of Dr.-Ing. (1965) and Dr. med. habil. (1969) at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Heidelberg. In 1973 he became a Professor of Physiology at Heidelberg University. He was Visiting Professor at Monash University (Australia), Wuhan Medical University (China) and Siena University (Italy). His research was on the neurophysiology of nociception, with a focus on descending inhibition from the midbrain onto spinal afferent processing, and the association of neuronal gene transcription with pain, regeneration and apoptosis in the CNS. In 1973 Manfred was a founding member of IASP, and served as IASP Councilor and Chairman of the Committee for Ethical Issues. In 1975 he was a founder of the German Pain Society and served as its President from 1982 to 1996. In 1993 he was founding member of EFIC and served as the President from 1996 to 1999. During his term EFIC had its first presentation to the European Parliament in 1998. 1975-2003 Zimmermann was founder and Chief Editor of Neuroscience Letters, and 1987-1992 founding Editor of “Der Schmerz”, the German Pain Journal. From 1984 Zimmermann was an initiator of pain therapy as a medical specialty in Germany, which was finally legalized by the Medical Board in 1996.