The Philip A. Spiegel Trainee Award is given to the trainee with the highest score in the financial aid application process, and facilitates travel and attendance at the IASP World Congress on Pain.
The 2024 awardee is Lakeisha Lewter, PhD, for her poster abstract, Assessing the Role of Amygdala Calcitonin Gene-Related Peptide Receptors on Chronic Bladder Pain. Her work focuses on visceral pain in women, specifically bladder pain. She is finding that the CGRP gene seems to perform two different functions in the two halves of the brain, and that although the actual bladder pathology was the same in the animals when the CGRP protein was increased in the right half of the brain, pain responses went down.
Dr. Lakeisha Lewter, a native of Laurel, MD, earned her BS in biology with a minor in psychology from Morgan State University in 2013. During her time at Morgan State, she was an MBRS-RISE trainee, conducting neuroscience research under Christine Hohmann. Following her graduation, Dr. Lewter pursued a PhD in neuroscience at The University at Buffalo, and focused on the potential use of subtype-selective GABAA receptor positive allosteric modulators for pain control in the lab of Jun-Xu Li. She received her doctorate in 2019 and was honored with the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Neurosicience Fund Doctoral Thesis Award.
Currently, Dr. Lewter is a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, working in Benedict Kolber’s lab. Her research employs multidisciplinary approaches to explore the mechanisms underlying chronic pain-related lateralization within the amygdala. In 2021, she was awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (NRSA-F32) from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for her research on the role of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptors on the development of persistent bladder pain. The following year, she received a Postdoctoral Diversity Enrichment Program Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. In 2023, she was selected to attend the North American Pain School in Montreal, Québec.
Dr. Lewter aspires to establish her own lab, dedicated to studying pain disorders that disproportionately affect women, such as endometriosis. She is deeply committed to diversifying the STEM workforce, serving as one of the Texas ambassadors for Black Women PhDs., LLC. Since 2022, she has served as a co-chair for the abdominal and pelvic pain special interest group of the United States Association for the Study of Pain.