Elizabeth R. Felix, PhD is a Research Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and a Research Health Scientist at the Miami Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Biological and Experimental Psychology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and went onto complete postdoctoral training in fMRI studies of pain processing at the University of Maryland and in pain associated with spinal cord injury at the University of Miami. Dr. Felix is the Project Director of the South Florida Spinal Cord Injury Model System Center, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).Her primary research interests include the measurement and characterization of the development and maintenance of chronic neuropathic pain, and her work is aimed at understanding the contributions of both somatosensory dysfunction and psychosocial risk-factors associated with this type of pain. She has over 20 years of experience using psychophysical techniques to measure somatosensory function (i.e. ,quantitative sensory testing) in both healthy populations and in chronic pain patients, including individuals with spinal cord injury. She has published studies on psychometric properties of pain measurement tools, on the differential activation of brain areas related to pain responsiveness using fMRI techniques, and on phenotyping of pain conditions based on results of quantitative sensory testing and symptom characteristics.
