Success Stories - Jill Recla
Hometown: Kingsford, Mich.
Undergrad: Bioinformatics, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Mich.
GSBS Concentration: Functional Genomics, The Jackson Laboratory
Advisers: Carol Bult and Gary Churchill, The Jackson Laboratory
Research: Recla is working to identify genes that influence an individual’s susceptibility to chronic pain, particularly after an injury. She’s using large-scale computational and lab techniques to study chronic pain susceptibility in diverse sets of lab mice to understand how two people can suffer the same injury, but have different pain outcomes.
In her words: “We’re currently establishing collaborative research projects with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Togus, Maine, to apply the results of this research in a clinical setting. It’s my hope that my work will lead to improved methods of individualized chronic pain treatment and prevention for all people, particularly our veteran population.”