A Parabrachial Hub for Need-state Control of Enduring Pain: How the Brain Gates Ongoing Pain During Competing Survival Needs. Feb 4, 2026 2-3pm ET

PURPOSE Web Series: Navigating Careers in Research

Wednesday, February 4, 2026
2:00 PM- 3:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM- 12:00 PM PT

To Register: Click here

Topic:  A Parabrachial Hub for Need-state Control of Enduring Pain: How the Brain Gates Ongoing Pain During Competing Survival Needs

About Episode 16:

Chronic pain remains difficult to quantify and treat in part because persistent pain is not simply prolonged nociception. In this session, the speakers will present evidence for a parabrachial brainstem hub that selectively tracks sustained pain and describe how competing survival states (including hunger, thirst, and threat) can suppress enduring pain through defined neuropeptidergic mechanisms. The talk integrates circuit-level experiments with computational modeling and offers a unifying framework relevant to basic, translational, and clinical pain research.

Featuring:

• Nitsan Goldstein, PhD,  Postdoctoral Fellow, Laboratory of Dr. Fan Wang, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Amadeus Maes, PhD,  Postdoctoral Associate | Computational Neuroscience

Join this highly-interactive discussion (bring your questions)

The webinar will include an interactive Q&A focused on conceptual implications, experimental design, translational relevance, and how these findings may inform future approaches to chronic pain assessment and intervention.

Goldstein, N., Maes, A., Allen, H. N., Nelson, T. S., Kruger, K. A., Kindel, M., … & Betley, J. N. (2025). A parabrachial hub for need-state control of enduring pain. Nature, 1-9.