Monika Halicka Spotlight
We have decided to aim the spotlight at Monika Halicka who is a Postdoctoral researcher at Department of Psychological sciences at UOL. We have previously collaborated with Monika during her time at University of Bath.
Monika is a psychologist who is primarily interested in interactions between pain and cognition, and associated changes in brain function. Her overaching objective is to combine psychological & neurophysiological methods to understand the mechanisms of chronic pain & increase therapeutic success through rigorous, clinically applied research.
Monika's Biography
While studying at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland), I engaged with several research projects and clinical internships. I was involved in a volunteer-based intervention to prevent hospitalization complications in older patients and assessing the frequency of placebo use in medicine. An internship at the Clinic of Pain Research and Management acquainted me with practical challenges in pain diagnosis and management. My Master’s thesis examined psychological factors contributing to the memory of post-operative pain. After graduation, I engaged with somatosensory stimulation techniques, psychophysics, and evoked potentials to study cognitive aspects of nociception as an intern at the Institute of Neuroscience at UCLouvain (Belgium).
My PhD at the University of Bath focused on the role of neuropsychological changes in the manifestation and treatment of chronic pain. Using computer-based and psychophysical experiments, I examined spatial cognition and body perception in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) and how they related to clinical signs of CRPS. I also led a large-scale, longitudinal clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of a sensory-motor adaptation treatment for CRPS.
I have joined the University of Liverpool to work on translational research to improve prognosis of chronic pain outcomes, together with Dr Chris Brown and collaborators at the Walton Centre and Liverpool Reviews and Implementation Group. I focus on identifying and modelling the predictors of spinal surgery outcomes for back pain, based on the literature and available clinical data. To improve our ability to predict treatment outcomes, we are also developing novel psycho-physiological markers of pain chronicity, and testing the feasibility and acceptability of their clinical use.