Joseph Ditre, associate professor of psychology, has been honored by the National Institutes of Health Pain Consortium with this year’s Mitchell Max Award for Research Excellence.
Joseph Ditre
Ditre was one of three finalists to be invited to deliver oral presentations of their work at the 2016 NIH Pain Consortium Symposium in Bethesda, Md. His presentation was titled “Nicotine Deprivation Increases Pain Sensitivity, Neurogenic Inflammation and Secondary Hyperalgesia among Daily Tobacco Smokers.” It focused on the question of whether daily smokers who abstain from smoking overnight subsequently experience greater reactivity to laboratory pain induction. One clinical implication of this work is that increased pain in the context of quitting could promote relapse to smoking among those with live with painful conditions.
A member of the Department of Psychology faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Pain and Addiction Research Lab, Ditre pursues research that cuts across basic and applied work in the areas of health psychology and behavioral medicine, with an emphasis on the intersection of addictive behaviors and comorbid medical disorders. More specifically, his team studies bidirectional relations between the experience of acute/chronic pain and the use/misuse of addictive substances, with the ultimate goal of translating these findings to inform the development of novel treatments.
A licensed clinical psychologist, Ditre holds secondary appointments in the Department of Medicine at Upstate Medical University and in the Center for Integrated Healthcare at the Syracuse Veterans Administration Medical Center.
