Dr. Theodore J. Price
- Professor of Neuroscience
- Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies
- Ashbel Smith Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas supports the Ashbel Smith Professorship. Dr. Ashbel Smith was the first president of the UT System Board of Regents. He had a long and distinguished career in medicine, education and public service. During his term on the Board of Regents, Smith was dedicated to recruiting the best faculty members available and to developing a curriculum befitting a “university of the first class.” Smith became known as both the “father of Texas medicine” and the “father of The University of Texas.”
“When I first set foot on the UTD campus in 1993 as a 19-year-old freshman, I never could have imagined that I would one day receive such an honor from the institution that has given me so much already. Our scientific work is focused on understanding what causes chronic pain and discovering new ways to treat this most common and often disabling disease. The talented students and postdocs, collaborators throughout the UT System, and resources that UTD has helped us assemble give me confidence that our understanding of chronic pain is advancing at an accelerating pace. We are getting closer and closer to developing new therapeutics that will improve the lives of people with intractable pain. This is our goal.”
Dr. Theodore J. Price BS’97 investigates how the nervous system’s ability to adapt alters how it receives pain-related information and how nervous system plasticity is a major driver for chronic pain.
His studies have described novel targets that regulate the excitability of sensory neurons after injury with a recent focus on mapping the cellular properties of human sensory neurons.
Price has pursued the development of non-opioid pain treatments and has founded companies that have been instrumental in moving these therapeutics into the clinic.
He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, including Cell, Science Translational Medicine, Neuron, The Journal of Neuroscience, Pain and Nature Reviews Neuroscience. He serves as editor-in-chief for Neurobiology of Pain and is an associate editor for the The Journal of Neuroscience.
Price received the Patrick D. Wall Young Investigator Award from the International Association for the Study of Pain and the John C. Liebeskind Early Career Scholar Award. He was recognized with the Buhrmester Rising Star Award from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Price graduated from The University of Texas at Dallas with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience after working with Dr. Alice O’Toole, the Aage and Margareta Møller Endowed Professor of psychology, on human face perception. He then received his PhD in pharmacology in 2003 from the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, where he served a postdoctoral fellowship. Until 2007, he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, where he developed the first studies on how local control of protein synthesis in neurons is involved in the development of chronic pain disorders.
From 2007 to 2014, Price was on the faculty of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, where he advanced his research on nervous system plasticity in relation to pain. He returned to UTD as an associate professor in 2014 and was named professor in 2018.