Pain: Basic Science

BIOGRAPHY

MD and PhD Stanford University School of Medicine, 1965-66; Residency in Neurology, Harvard Medical School, 1970-72; Elected to the U.S. Institute of Medicine, 1997; Editor in Chief, International Association for the Study of Pain Press; Director, Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction.

Acknowledgements: State of California Alcohol and Addiction Research Program, National Institutes of Health

Research Interests: Professor Fields and his colleagues study the neurobiology of motivation, both pain and pleasure. They are interested in how alcohol, palatable foods and addictive drugs alter behaviour. In particular, the current focus is on how opioids contribute to motivated behaviours and addiction through modulation of dopamine.

There are several distinct opioid receptors: mu, kappa, and delta, and endogenous opioids: endorphins, enkephalins, dynorphins and endomorphins. Their goal is to determine how each of these endogenous opioids and their receptors regulate motivation and reinforcement.

Their laboratory uses a number of different techniques to address neural mechanisms of motivation and decision: lesions and drug microinjection in awake behaving rodents; electrophysiology in awake behaving rats and in vitro brain slices; axonal tracing; confocal microscopy; human functional magnetic resonance imaging.