Rebecca Seal

Dr. Seal is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Otolaryngology and the Pittsburgh Center for Pain Research. Her work has focused on the neurobiology of neurotransmitter transporters and their role in nervous system function including hearing, vision, motor output and pain. Dr. Seal began her studies of neural basis of pain as a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF in San Francisco, where she and her colleagues discovered an essential role for a particular neurotransmitter transporter in a form of persistent pain termed mechanical allodynia (Seal et al Nature in 2009). Pain is now a major focus of her laboratory. Her group is working to delineate the neural circuits underlying persistent pain with the goal of identifying novel therapeutic strategies for this major clinical problem (Peirs et al Neuron 2015, Peirs and Seal, Science 2016). Dr. Seal has received several prestigious scholar awards including from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, Hearing Health Foundation, American Diabetes Association and the American Pain Society.