Graduate student awarded prestigious NIH fellowship to study brain networks and chronic pain
Corinne Augusto, a graduate student in Penn State College of Medicine’s neuroscience doctoral program, has received a highly competitive fellowship from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to support her research training.
The National Research Service Award (NRSA) F31 fellowship, awarded through the National Institutes of Health, will fund Augusto’s research investigating the role of the brain’s default mode network (DMN) in the development and persistence of chronic pain.
Chronic pain affects millions of people in the United States and is a leading cause of disability, yet its underlying neural mechanisms, and how temporary acute pain becomes a lasting condition, remain incompletely understood.
“Pain is the most common reason for seeking medical care,” said Jennifer Nyland, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics and Augusto’s mentor. “It is fundamental to our survival, alerting us to potential threats and disease, yet we still know so little about it. Corinne will investigate neural networks that may contribute to chronic pain.”
Augusto’s work focuses on how changes in communication within large-scale brain networks – particularly the DMN, a collection of brain regions active during rest and internally focused thought – may contribute to the transition from acute to chronic pain.
“The DMN is involved in activities like daydreaming, imagination and other internally directed thought processes,” Augusto explained. “In patients with chronic pain, this network has been found to behave abnormally compared to people without chronic pain. Given these repeated findings, the DMN could be a useful biomarker to detect the presence of chronic pain or monitor the progression of acute pain.”
A biomarker – an objective, measurable biological indicator – could help validate patients’ experiences and reduce stigma.
“Something quantitatively detectable beyond self-reported symptoms is crucial to bolstering patient complaints, removing stigma and assessing the effectiveness of treatments,” Augusto said.
That intersection of biology, patient experience and treatment outcomes is what first drew Augusto to the field. She became interested in chronic pain research through her previous work in addiction science.
“One of the most common self-reported reasons for opioid misuse is to relieve physical pain,” she said. “Insufficiently managed chronic pain puts patients at risk of opioid use disorder. Effectively treating chronic pain, or preventing the progression of acute pain into chronic pain, is another avenue in fighting our country’s opioid epidemic.”
Her research aims to evaluate the DMN as a potential neuroimaging biomarker of chronic pain while also probing whether brain inflammation may contribute to abnormal network behavior. By better understanding how pain becomes “stuck” for some patients but not others, she hopes her work will inform improved therapies and prediction tools that identify which patients with acute pain are most at risk of developing chronic pain.
The NIH NRSA F31 fellowship is highly competitive. Across institutes, success rates typically range from 15% to 35%, and applications undergo rigorous peer review.
“This award is a testament not only to Corinne’s hard work but also to her potential as a future independent investigator,” Nyland said. “She is a brilliant student with unrivaled dedication to her research. She doesn’t hesitate to take on hard problems and fully immerse herself in understanding every intricate detail to arrive at a solution. That characteristic will serve her well throughout her scientific career.”
In addition to financial support, the fellowship provides advanced research training and dedicated time to focus exclusively on her work – an experience she hopes will prepare her for a career in academic neuroscience.
By advancing understanding of how large-scale brain networks contribute to chronic pain, Augusto’s work has the potential to shift how clinicians and researchers conceptualize pain – moving beyond symptoms to the underlying neural systems involved.
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