2020 IASP World Congress Pain Award Winners Interview Jan Vollert

Pain Research Forum, 24 February 2020

At the IASP 2021 Virtual World Congress on Pain, to take place June 9-11 and June 16-18, the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) will present awards to honor the achievements of up-and-coming as well as more established investigators (these awards were originally to be presented at the 2020 World Congress on Pain in Amsterdam, which was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic). In advance of the meeting, PRF spoke with each of the winners. In this interview, we chat with Jan Vollert, PhD, winner of the Ronald Dubner Research Prize. This is a trainee award that honors the best clinical or basic science research paper, series of papers, or doctoral thesis in the field of pain, published or in press while training as a student, intern, resident, predoctoral fellow, postdoctoral fellow, or equivalent.

Vollert is a biostatistician working at Imperial College London, UK, and the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on the application of statistical and computational models to pain research, mainly to quantitative sensory testing. He has made significant contributions to the German Research Network on Neuropathic Pain and the EU-funded EuroPain network, particularly his work in unifying and managing the largest sensory phenotype database in the world. Here, Vollert speaks with Lincoln Tracy, PhD, a researcher and freelance writer based in Melbourne, Australia, to discuss how he entered the pain research field, his work on sensory phenotypes, and who he’d want at the table with him for his ideal dinner party. Read more.