Paul Geha

Paul Geha, M.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, with joint appointments in Dentistry, Neurology, and Neuroscience. His research focuses on the neuroscience of pain, hedonics, and feeding, using advanced neuroimaging techniques to study chronic pain mechanisms, obesity, and brain-derived biomarkers. He leads the Pain and Perceptions Lab, which investigates neural adaptations in chronic pain and obesity, with a focus on identifying reproducible brain signatures of pain conditions.

Dr. Geha's education includes an MD from the American University of Beirut and residencies/fellowships in Psychiatry and Clinical Neurophysiology at Yale and Northwestern. He has received the Seymour L. Lustman Award for Psychiatric Research from Yale.

His research spans multimodal neuroimaging, including fMRI and diffusion MRI, to map brain pathways related to pain resilience, chronic pain chronification, and pain treatment responses. Key projects include studying age/sex influences on chronic back pain brain signatures and developing biomarkers for chronic pain through language and facial expression analysis.

• Grants: NIH-funded studies on brain biomarkers (R01NS126451, R01AR080627, R01NS127901).
• Achievements: First published brain signature for chronic back pain (PNAS 2020), validated across cohorts.
• Labs/Teams: Pain and Perceptions Lab collaborates with neuroimaging centers and clinical services for translational research.