Professor Brett Graham has over 20 years’ experience studying spinal pain processing mechanisms and leads the cellular studies in this project.
His career publication and funding record highlight his ability to successfully execute technically challenging and innovative projects. This includes 27 manuscripts using ex vivo spinal cord preparations to study the sensory processing mechanisms, and 6 manuscripts using in vivo preparations for the same purpose.
In addition, his research group has published extensively on several spinal cell populations using transgenic mouse lines and viral transfection approaches such as those proposed for the current study. This work also includes use of the spared nerve injury model and inflammatory models to study pathological signalling and associated behavioural testing.

Professor Graham is Chair of the Hunter Medical Research Institute’s Brain Neuromodulation Research Program, holds an academic position in Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy School at the University of Newcastle. He was awarded his PhD qualifications (2006) before undertaking a 2-year postdoctoral posting in the Priority Research Centre for Brain and Mental Health at the University of Newcastle. He then took up his current posting and established the Spinal Cord Connection Research Group that he continues to lead. Over this period his research focus has been to decipher and characterise spinal sensory processing mechanisms, particularly pain.
His studies span the full range of electrophysiological approaches, from single channel analysis, in vitro and in vivo patch clamp, calcium imaging and multielectrode array recording techniques.