PARC is pleased to announce the UCSF faculty member who has been selected as the recipient of the 2024 PARC Fellowship. Dr. Tommaso Di Ianni, Departments of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Radiology & Biomedical Imaging (joint appointment), School of Medicine, is the PARC Fellow of 2024-2025.
The PARC Fellowship, supported by an anonymous donor, provides an award to UCSF faculty conducting innovative pre-clinical and clinical research in pain, addiction, and the intersection thereof. Recipients of the award receive $100,000, which can be used flexibly to advance the fellow’s research. PARC is very pleased to support research that advances the mission of developing and testing new approaches to treat pain and addiction.
Dr. Tommaso Di Ianni’s research project is entitled, “Circuit mechanisms of opioid-mediated responses to subanesthetic ketamine.” Sub-anesthetic ketamine has gained much recent attention as a treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders including major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and chronic pain. However, we still lack a complete understanding of ketamine’s mechanism of action, and recent evidence links ketamine's efficacy to activation of the opioid receptors in key regions of the brain's reward system. In this project, we will use a highly sensitive neuroimaging modality, functional ultrasound imaging, to quantify brain-wide interactions between subanesthetic ketamine and opioid receptors and to determine how these interactions modulate and are modulated by the reward system in a rodent model.
Congratulations to this year’s PARC awardee!