Prof. Giancarlo Carli was born near Siena, Italy in 1938. He received his MD Degree from Siena University (1962) and was postdoctoral fellow both at Siena (Prof. Alberto Zanchetti) and Pisa (Prof. Giuseppe Moruzzi) Universities and at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA, Prof Vernon B. Mountcastle). He developed his academic carrier in Siena first as associate (1971) and then as full Professor (1981). He served as Chairman of the Institute of Human Physiology (1974-2002) and as Chairman of the Department of Physiology (2008-2010). He is an expert on the effects of persistent pain on animal behavior and on chronic pain in fibromyalgia patients.

William Maixner received his PhD and DDS degrees from the University of Iowa, where he also completed a 2-year Fellowship before being appointed Staff Fellow and Pharmacology Research Associate at the NIH. He joined the Dental School faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1985, rising through the academic ranks from Assistant Professor to Distinguished University Professor and serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 1999-2005, when he was named Director of the Center for Pain Research and Innovation. He joined Duke University in January 2016 as Director of the Center for Translational Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology. An expert in the pain field, Dr. Maixner has published widely in basic pain mechanisms, neuronal pain coding properties, pharmacology of opioids, gender differences in pain perception, and human pain genetics. His Duke program focuses on translating laboratory and clinical findings into novel diagnostics and therapeutics to prevent or alleviate chronic pain.

Marzia Malcangio is Head of the Wolfson Centre for Age Related Diseases and Professor of Neuropharmacology at King’s College London where she has established an internationally renowned laboratory devoted to the study of the positive and negative modulation of pain transmission with particular emphasis on chronic pain.
She has published more than 100 papers on pain and edited a book on Synaptic plasticity in Pain. Her current work explores novel approaches to target neuropathic and arthritic pain unveiling the involvement of microglia in the CNS and monocyte/macrophages in the periphery and the mechanisms governing immune-neuronal cell communication.

Peter Reeh was born and grew up in the countryside near Nuremberg, Germany, in 1948. His MD (1975) and PhD (1979/81) were from the University of Erlangen. He was a PostDoc in the Physiological Institutes of the Munich and Heidelberg Universities, where he achieved his ’Habilitation’ (second doctorate) in 1986. He was appointed Full Professor in 1987 at the Institute of Physiology & Pathophysiology in Erlangen, where he served as Vice Director and (for 3 years) as Chairman until 2017. Formally retired as a ‘Senior Fellow’, he is now carrying on with research and publishing. His interests have ever been focused on the functions of the primary afferent, nociceptive neuron, applying electrophysiological, neurochemical and molecular biological methods to study the mechanisms of sensory transduction, sensitization, neuropeptide release and of action potential generation and conduction. His lab won several national and international research prizes.