Beth Darnall, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Anesthesiology and Peri-Operative Medicine at OHSU.  As a pain research psychologist, she has been investigating the immunologic impact of negative cognition in persons with chronic pain. Her work is describing how overfocusing on negative expectations, or "catastrophizing," elicits immune responses via increased circulating pro-inflammatory cytokines.  She has found gender differences in immune response that suggest sex-steroids may influence the immune system by enhancing salient emotional and cognitive processing pathways.  As a BIRCWH scholar, her research will examine the effect of estrogen on immunologic response to catastrophizing in women with chronic pain.  

I received my Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Northwestern University in 2005.  I recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Vollum Institute in the laboratory of Dr. John P. Adelman, during which I investigated the role of SK/K_Ca² channels, a class of Ca²⁺-activated K⁺ channels linked with memory encoding, in regulating information transfer and storage in the hippocampal CA1 area.  For my BIRWCH fellowship, I will focus on evaluating how ovarian steroid estrogen alters the function of neural circuits in the hippocampus derived from young and aged female animals.  The hippocampus is a brain region important for learning and memory.  There is compelling evidence that the electrical properties of hippocampal neurons are altered by learning and during aging.  Importantly, the hippocampus is also a major target region of estrogen.  Therefore in women, the process of normal brain aging converges with a changing neuroendocrine background during and following the period of menopausal transition. Understanding the mechanisms by which estrogen regulates neuronal activity in an age-related manner is thus essential in advancing our understanding of normal brain aging in women—a prerequisite in the design of specific, gender-based therapeutic intervention to treat age-related cognitive decline. My mentors for the BIRWCH fellowship are Drs. John P. Adelman in the Vollum Institute, James Maylie in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, and John F. Disterhoft at Northwestern University.