Current Members

Dr. Reza Sharif-Naeini

Principal Investigator

Dr. Sharif has been an assistant professor at McGill University since 2012. He previously completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institut de Pharmacologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire in Valbonne, France.

Dr. Hugues Petitjean

Post-doctoral fellow

Hugues did his Ph.D at the “Institut des neurosciences cellulaires et integratives” in Strasbourg, France. He has identified a new pain processing circuit in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord using a combination of electrophysiological and behavioural approaches. Hugues did his first post-doctoral position in the Department of Physiology of Saarland University in Germany, where he developed a new quantification method of spike code. Since January 2014, he has been part of the laboratory and works on the characterization of micro-neuronal circuits involved in pain processing.

Dr. Marine Karine Christin

Post-doctoral fellow

Marine comes from Nice, France, where she completed a bachelor and a master in Biology, specializing in physiology and neurobiology. She did her Ph.D at the “Institut de pharmacologie moleculaire et cellulaire” in Valbonne, France, where she studied the role of background potassium channel TREK in pain perception using electrophysiology (nerve skin preparation and patch clamp technique), calcium imaging and behavioural tests. Marine joined the laboratory in February 2015 and now focuses on studying the role of mechano-sensitive channels in pain.

Albena Davidova, MSc

Lab technician

Albena did her bachelor in Chemical Engineering and her master in Physiology at McGill University. She joined the laboratory in 2012. Albena is responsible for the basic laboratory maintenance tasks and molecular biology assays, mouse colony management and genotyping, tissue culture, purchasing of laboratory material and keeping inventory.

Tarheen Fatima

Graduate student

Amanda MacPherson

Undergraduate student

Amanda is currently in her last year of a Neuroscience major with a minor in Computer Science. She has worked as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory for the past 2 summers and has contributed to two main projects. The first examined the role of a specific mechano-sensitive channel in cell migration and the localization of this channel within the cell using immunostaining.   The second project involves the use of calcium imaging to characterize the effect of a toxin on primary neuronal cell culture.

Robbie Flessner

Undergraduate student

Deborah Tsao

Undergraduate student

Deborah is currently in her last year of an Honours Physiology major at McGill. She is doing her honours project in the lab, investigating how parvalbumin-expressing interneurons function in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord in neuropathic pain conditions. She is particularly interested in using optogenetic tools to manipulate and control these neurons in awake, behaving animals to study their function in vivo. 

Stéphanie Mouchbahani Constance

Undergraduate student

Stephanie is currently in her last year of a Physiology major at McGill. She is currently studying Lionfish venom, and is characterizing its nociceptive effects as well as identifying its molecular targets in the pain pathway in order to better understand how it causes pain.