Rima El-Sayed completed her Honours Bachelor of Science in the Neuroscience specialist and Physiology major streams at UofT in 2019. During her undergraduate program she took several additional courses to develop her computer coding skills and completed a research project in Or. Benjamin Ounkley’s lab at The Hospital for Sick Children that helped her learn how to analyze magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging data. After a successful transfer from MSc to PhD, she is now completing her second year in the Institute of Medical Sciences program at U of T and was awarded the OGS scholarship twice during this time. As part of Dr. Karen Davis’s lab at UHN Toronto Western Hospital, her research involves investigating how measurements from tools such as MEG and conditioned pain modulation (CPM) can help predict treatment outcome in those with chronic pain. She has developed research skills including collecting a battery of quantitative sensory testing and setting up and recording MEG scans in patients and healthy individuals. As part of her PhD thesis, Rima hopes to discover predictors for treatment outcome from patients in two treatment groups: those receiving paresthesiafree spinal cord stimulation or carpal tunnel syndrome surgery. She has given a poster presentation on her CPM study’s preliminary findings at the SfN virtual conference in 2021.
