VISCERALMIND is headed by Dr. Melissa Farmer, a scientist entrepreneur with roots in chronic pain physiology, neuroscience, and sexology. She currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Dr. Farmer’s educational background includes a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada and postdoctoral research in pain neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. While at Northwestern, she did a 3-year stint as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology in the Feinberg School of Medicine. Over the years, her translational research has focused on cognition, emotion, embodiment, and pain perception from multiple perspectives (cellular, systems, behavior, psychophysiology, clinical psychological assessment/psychotherapy, multimodal neuroimaging, and animal model development).
Dr. Farmer authored 28 peer-reviewed papers in journals like Science Translational Medicine, Journal of Neuroscience, Pain, and Archives of Sexual Behavior, including 5 papers featured in post-publication peer-review by F1000. She has delivered 34 invited lectures in 10 countries to multidisciplinary audiences of physicians, psychologists, physical therapists, and sexologists.
Dr. Farmer gives a special shout-out to her strong international following of physical therapists, who naturally understand that chronic pain is an embodied emotional-cognitive-spatial experience.
Current interests include:
- Deciphering mechanisms underlying complex chronic pain;
- Fear memory formation/reconsolidation of visceral pain; and
- Development of pain neuroscience education for non-scientists.
visceralmind 