Keynote Speaker
Associate Professor – Department of Cell Biology and Physiology
Dr. Scherrer received his PharmD and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Strasbourg, France. He subsequently completed two postdoctoral trainings, first in Neurophysiology of the Spinal Cord Dorsal Horn at the University of California San Francisco and second in Neurobiology of Pain and its Control at Columbia University. Before moving to the UNC School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, he was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University.
Dr. Scherrer's research current interests lie the neuroanatomy of neural circuits that underlie pain perception, opioid analgesia, and addiction. His laboratory investigates the sensory, emotional and cognitive dimensions of pain, and how opioids act in neural circuits to produce pain relief and their deleterious side effects such as tolerance, addiction and respiratory depression. Dr. Scherrer’s multidisciplinary research combines molecular and cellular biology, neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, optogenetics, chemogenetics, in vivo recordings of neural activity, and behavioral experiments.
