Chelsea Kaplan, PhD

Chelsea Kaplan is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and the Director of Neuroimaging in the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center (CPFRC). She completed her undergraduate degree in Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science and received her doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2018. Her graduate and postdoctoral training was completed at the CPFRC where she focused on examining the neurobiology of chronic pain using multimodal imaging techniques. Dr. Kaplan’s research includes investigating the central nervous system contributions to nociplastic pain across many conditions, identifying biomarkers that predict treatment outcomes, and examining the neural correlates of inflammation in rheumatic disease and nociplastic pain conditions. Her most recent work is focused on investigating behavioral and neurobiological factors associated with the development and trajectory of chronic pain in children. Understanding the neural vulnerability to pain may provide new insights about pain mechanisms, with the hope that identifying at-risk youth will enable early interventions that may alter the lifelong course of chronic pain.

• The neurobiological mechanisms underlying the development of chronic pain during childhood and adolescence
• Identification of central nervous system biomarkers in nociplastic/centralized pain
• The relationship between peripheral inflammation and brain function