Dr. Nader Ghasemlou awarded 2023 Mihran and Mary Basmajian Award

News & Announcements | 15 Nov 2023

Dr. Nader Ghasemlou is the 2023 recipient of the Mihran and Mary Basmajian Award for Excellence in Health Research.

Established by Dr. J.V. Basmajian in memory of his parents, the Basmajian Award is granted annually to Queen’s Health Sciences’ (QHS) faculty who have made an outstanding contribution to health research. Dr. Ghasemlou is being celebrated for his extraordinary impact in the fields of neuroinflammation and circadian biology, which he studies in the context of diseases including chronic pain, spinal cord injury, and multiple sclerosis.

Dr. Ghasemlou is a neuroimmunologist and Associate Professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Neuroscience Studies. His research lab is focused on understanding the interactions that take place between the nervous and immune systems during injury and disease, and in developing new therapies to improve pain, locomotor recovery, and psychosocial outcomes. In addition, he has developed new tools to study pain behaviours across species that have been adopted by many basic and clinical science labs globally, and new animal models of injury and disease. His impressive contributions have been published in many high-impact journals, including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Science Translational Medicine, and Brain (with an H-index of 22) and recognized by diverse national and international funding agencies.

In just eight years since Dr. Ghasemlou joined QHS, he has proven himself a leader within the faculty and scientific community, with leadership roles in the Canadian Pain Society, the Chronic Pain Network, and most recently as co-lead of the Research Excellence Cluster in Tissue Inflammation & Regeneration in QHS. He is a highly-respected mentor to trainees who have gone on to establish their own successful careers in academia, biotech, and beyond. Prior to joining Queen’s in 2015, Dr. Ghasemlou was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

As stated in one nomination support letter, “Dr. Ghasemlou has an innate ability to develop fascinating and intersectional research projects…(he) is publishing quality science that is advancing our understanding of pain mechanisms both directly and indirectly.” Another states that, “Nader’s work is unquestionably giving us new insight into mechanisms of neuropathic pain, and I think that it is likely that much better therapeutics for pain will result from his contributions.”

Learn more about Dr. Ghasemlou and his research.

Dr. Nader Ghasemlou awarded 2023 Mihran and Mary Basmajian Award

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