Dr. Gregory Dussor
- Professor and Department Head of Neuroscience
- Eugene McDermott Distinguished Professor
The McDermott Professorships were established in August 2017, funded by an anonymous gift, with the goal of providing early career support and recognition to faculty members who have established extraordinary records of research productivity, teaching excellence and university service, and who show promise of being leaders of the UT Dallas faculty in the future.
“UT Dallas has been incredibly supportive of our work investigating pathological mechanisms of migraine. The significant recent investments in infrastructure, including the world-class research building and core facilities we utilize, are instrumental both to the success of our work and to our ability to recruit talented students and postdoctoral fellows. Using this support, our ultimate goal is to translate the basic discoveries from the laboratory into new therapeutics, an effort I hope would make Eugene McDermott proud.”
Dr. Gregory Dussor’s research focuses on pain disorders, with an emphasis on uncovering pathological mechanisms and therapeutic targets for migraine headache.
His lab works to identify the cellular causes for peripheral pain signaling from the meninges to enhance the understanding of plasticity at the central terminals of these neurons and to uncover mechanisms that contribute to the increased prevalence of migraine in women.
His work has highlighted brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that may prove central to the sensitization process in migraine sufferers. He’s also identified targets within the afferent nociceptive system from the meninges, including acid-sensing ion channels, several TRP channels, and IL-6 signaling mechanisms. His most recent work has focused on the female-specific effects of prolactin on pain signaling from the meninges.
Dussor is co-founder and co-director of the Pain Neurobiology Research Group.
Dussor has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, including Neuroscience, Pain, The Journal of Neuroscience, Headache and Cephalalgia. He serves on the editorial team for the journals Pain, Molecular Pain and Pain Reports.
Dussor is on the Medical Advisory Board of the Migraine Research Foundation. He has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Headache Foundation and The Migraine Research Foundation.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from The University of Alabama and received his PhD in pharmacology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 2002.
For four years, he did postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Ed McCleskey at the Vollum Institute on the campus of the Oregon Health & Science University.
In 2007 he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, where he began to focus on understanding the pathophysiology contributing to chronic headache disorders. He joined the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2014.