Waterloo Pharmacy welcomes new faculty member
Congratulations to Dr. Annemarie Dedek, newly appointed assistant professor at the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy, on receiving the 2024 Government of Canada’s Canadian Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI-JELF) for her project: Translational approaches to studying chronic pain.
The funding recognizes innovative leaders and will enable Dr. Dedek to understand the molecular cascade that underlies the development of chronic pain and how analgesic drugs affect pain processing cells. The requested infrastructure of $100,000 will make these research goals possible by allowing Dr. Dedek to stimulate and record whole populations of spinal cord pain processing neurons, to create an understanding of how these cells work together to modulate pain signals.
Dr. Dedek’s research focuses on using translational models to better understand the physiological changes associated with chronic pain, with a particular focus on understanding the role of sex on the processing of painful stimuli. The Dedek Lab studies how the spinal cord processes pain signals, and how this signaling can change in response to chronic pain. A particular focus on the lab is to examine the role of sex and sex hormones on pain signaling.
Dr. Dedek received her PhD in Neuroscience from Carleton University. She then went on to an Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowship in partnership with Eli Lilly where she is using high definition multielectrode arrays to study spinal cord pain processing circuits. Finally, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University where she used clinical data and human research techniques to study clinical outcomes related to treating pain. Dr. Dedek is a member of the Waterloo Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology, the Canadian Pain Society, and the Canadian Association for Neuroscience.
Congratulations and welcome to Waterloo Pharmacy Dr. Dedek!