MOSAIC Systems Health & Pain Science Lab
Goals
Our VIP team goal is to bridge bench and bedside in a translational pain and recovery program that asks the same core questions at three scales: mechanisms in mouse models, outcomes in surgical patients, and patterns in large population datasets.
We are recruiting highly motivated students into a coordinated research program that connects basic science, clinical care, and public-health data. The lab studies why some people recover after injury or surgery while others develop persistent pain, fatigue, and loss of function, and how biology, behavior, rehabilitation, and environment interact to shape that trajectory. This work is embedded in an NIH-funded translational pain and musculoskeletal research program and related early-career scholar applications at the University of Arizona.
Students can contribute in one or more of three overlapping tracks. In the wet lab, students work with mouse models of postoperative and chronic pain under approved IACUC protocols, learning animal handling, behavioral testing, tissue and blood collection, and sample processing for redox and immune biomarkers. In the clinical arm, students support IRB-regulated studies of people undergoing elective surgery, including prescreening and recruitment, informed-consent support, electronic surveys, study-visit coordination, and assistance with blood collection, processing, and data entry. In the epidemiology arm, students use large public datasets to study pain at the population level, including environmental exposures, routine bloodwork-based inflammatory indices, and cytokine patterns in aging women.
These roles are a strong fit for students considering careers in physical therapy, medicine, nursing, public health, neuroscience, or clinical research. No prior research experience is required. Training is structured and supervised, and projects are designed so that careful student work can contribute to abstracts and manuscripts.
Issues Involved or Addressed
The lab works at the intersection of neuroscience, immunology, rehabilitation, and population health to understand recovery after injury. We study how the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems respond to surgery and tissue damage; how stress, sleep, movement, medications, and environment shape those responses; and whether low-risk interventions such as Nacetylcysteine (NAC) can improve recovery and reduce the need for opioids. Population analyses then place those mechanisms in a broader frame: who carries a higher inflammatory burden, who is more exposed to environmental toxicants, and which groups, including aging women, show immune signatures that travel with persistent pain.
Key issues we explore include:
- Biological drivers of pain, inflammation, and tissue healing after surgery
- How oxidative stress and redox balance relate to pain and function
- Mouse models of postoperative and chronic pain to test mechanisms and candidate treatments
- Patient-reported pain, mood, sleep, and function in the weeks after surgery
- How physical activity and rehabilitation relate to biological markers and recovery
- Prediction of who is at risk for poor recovery using clinical data and biomarkers
- How environmental exposures such as heavy metals and pesticides relate to chronic pain in the general
population - Whether routine CBC-derived inflammatory and immune indices can serve as scalable markers of pain
risk - How cytokine profiles in aging women relate to pain burden and recovery potential
- How findings at one scale, from mice, patients, or public data, generate testable questions for the others
Methods and Tech
Students see the same scientific questions handled with the tools that match each scale of the work. Wet-lab training covers animal handling, postoperative pain behavior testing, study-compound dosing such as Nacetylcyteine, and standardized collection and processing of blood and tissue for inflammation, redox, and related biomarkers. Clinical training covers participant screening and recruitment, consent support, survey administration, brief functional testing, and observation of blood collection and processing in a research-clinic setting. Epidemiology training covers literature synthesis, variable selection, data extraction and cleaning, analysis planning, and reproducible production of tables and figures.
Examples of approaches students may be exposed to include:
- Mouse models of postoperative pain with standardized behavioral assays
- Wet-lab skills such as pipetting, sample storage, ELISA, and multiplex assays for cytokines and oxidative-
stress markers - Clinical research workflows including consent processes, REDCap data entry, and secure data
management - Validated questionnaires for pain, function, mood, and sleep, plus brief in-clinic physical performance
measures - Secondary analysis of nationally representative and related large cohort datasets, including resources
such as NHANES - Data dictionaries, codebooks, analysis logs, and manuscript-ready tables and figures
Current Epidemiology Projects
The population-science arm is built to complement the mouse and surgical-patient work, not to sit apart from it.
Signals found in public data can be followed into biospecimens and models; findings from the bench and clinic can be checked against national patterns. These projects are structured as publishable epidemiology studies. Typical student contributions include background literature review, variable selection, data pulling and cleaning, statistical analysis planning and performance, and support for abstracts or manuscripts.
Environmental exposures and chronic pain. We use nationally representative biomonitoring data to examine whether environmental toxicants such as heavy metals and pesticide-related markers are associated with chronic pain, high-impact pain, and related functional limitation. Models account for demographic, behavioral, and comorbidity factors so that exposure–pain relationships can be interpreted as population-health questions rather than isolated laboratory findings.
CBC-based indices of inflammation and immune dysfunction and pain. Complete blood count panels are already part of routine care, but derived indices such as the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio are rarely used with pain phenotyping in mind. This project estimates normative distributions for these indices and tests their associations with pain burden, with the goal of producing reference information that can support risk stratification and future bedside studies.
Cytokines and pain in aging women. Pain is common in midlife and older women and is not fully explained by injury or osteoarthritis alone. We analyze inflammatory cytokine profiles in aging female cohorts to map how immune aging, sex-specific biology, and pain co-occur. The aim is to generate hypotheses for targeted recovery strategies and to connect population immune signatures with the lab’s mechanistic and clinical biomarker panels.
Academic Majors of Interest
This team is open to students from a broad range of majors who are interested in pain, recovery, and translational health research. Students drawn to wet-lab work, patient-facing research, or data analysis are all encouraged to apply.
Majors and programs of particular interest include:
- Physiology and Medical Sciences
- Neuroscience and Cognitive Science
- Public Health and Epidemiology
- Psychological Science
- Biomedical Engineering and Systems Engineering
- Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology
- Data Science, Statistics, and Applied Mathematics
- Nutritional Sciences
- Nursing, Medicine, and Pre-Med tracks
- Rehabilitation and Movement Sciences, Kinesiology, Exercise Science
- Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
Preferred Interests and Preparation
Skills
- Coursework in biology, physiology, neuroscience, public health, or statistics is helpful but not required
- Interest in wet-lab techniques, animal methods under close supervision, patient-facing research, or large
public datasets - Willingness to learn tools such as REDCap, R, Stata, or a similar analysis environment, depending on
track - Comfort reading methods papers, following protocols, and documenting decisions
Attributes
- Reliable, organized, and punctual
- Respectful and professional in clinical, laboratory, and team settings
- Curious, willing to ask questions, and comfortable working on a multidisciplinary team
- Interested in pain, recovery, rehabilitation, or translational research
- Willing to commit consistent time each week across semesters
Application Process
To express interest in this team, please complete the VIP Interest Form and select “MOSAIC Systems Health &
Pain Science Lab.” In your note, it is helpful to say whether you are most drawn to the wet lab, the clinical
studies, the epidemiology projects, or a combination.
This team:
- Accepts students at the start of each semester
- Recruits students for both credit and Federal Work Study options, as available, for team participation
Please note that the wet lab portion is currently not accepting students, and the clinical portion is only
accepting backup applications. There are still spaces in the Epidemiology part of the program.