Karen Davis Scientist
Karen D. Davis is a Neuroscience professor at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Brain and Behaviour and is the head of Division of Brain, Imaging & Behaviour Systems, Toronto Western Research Institute (TWRI). She belongs to a privileged scientific lineage of scientists that includes Jonathan Dostrovsky, John O'Keefe, Patrick Wall, Donald Hebb and Sherrington. Her main interest is the central mechanisms underlying pain and temperature perception, the influence of attention, and mechanisms of plasticity under normal conditions and in patients with neurologic or psychiatric disorders. A variety of experimental techniques are used, including functional brain imaging (fMRI, PET) psychophysical and cognitive assessment, and electrophysiological recordings in the thalamus and cortex. Davis' laboratory has developed innovative brain-imaging approaches, culminating in the first functional MRI images of brain networks underlying the human pain experience and the first images of the impact of deep brain stimulation for Parkinsonian tremor. Davis has also worked on phantom pain. She has demonstrated that findings support the hypothesis that the thalamic representation of the amputated limb remains functional in amputees with phantoms. Through several studies, she has shown important interactions between pain and cognition, by studying how brain networks shift their function towards pain while multitasking on cognitive tasks (Seminowicz et al, 2007; Erpelding et al, 2013) or when processing multimodal sensory information (Downar et al) or during mind wandering (Kucyi et al, 2013). Davis' works have been cited over 10145 times and she has an h-index of 52.