Partap Khalsa, DC, PhD, a chiropractic scientist, has appeared several times on the front page of DC for his significant accomplishment in furthering chiropractic research.
Now he is privileged and honored to be the first chiropractic scientist to ever receive a biomedical engineering research grant from the Whitaker Foundation, a prestigious and highly competitive award for scientists to perform cutting-edge research in this area.
The grant, effective Sept. 1, 1997, is for $205,000 over three years to study "neural population mechanisms that encode noxious and non-noxious mechanical stimuli."
"This research," explained Dr. Khalsa, "will examine how populations of nociceptive neurons in skin encode noxious compressive and tensile loads. It will enhance understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of how pain develops following tissue threatening mechanical stimuli."
The road to this grant began when Dr. Khalsa received a postdoctoral appointment at Yale. After a year it was upgraded to a research track faculty appointment in the department of anesthesiology at Yale University.
This past summer he received an offer for a tenure track faculty appointment as an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and orthopaedics at the State University of New York (SUNY) School of Medicine at Stony Brook, which he accepted beginning September 1, 1997. SUNY was recently ranked as second among "Research I Public Universities" by Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond in their recently released report, The Rise of American Research Universities.
Both the new faculty position and the grant are important for chiropractic. "It gives chiropractic a stronger foothold in the 'hard' sciences of neurophysiology and soft tissue biomechanics, and another platform from which we can show that we are 'real,'" said Dr. Khalsa.
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