Em. Prof Fernand ANTON

Fernand Anton is a Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Luxembourg and manages both the animal and the human pain research laboratories of the research unit INSIDE.

He received a PhD degree in psychology from the University of Innsbruck in 1983; afterwards he spent postdoctoral periods at the Physiology Department of the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH- Bethesda, USA), respectively. Before joining the University of Luxembourg he was a research associate at the Physiology Department of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he received his habilitation in 1994.

His domain of expertise is the neurophysiology of nociceptive processing and the measurement of pain in animals and humans. His team is interested in the impact of stress and altered stress hormone levels (adrenocortical reactivity) on the development and maintenance of enhanced pain sensitivity. To this purpose, the laboratory combines neurobiological (electrophysiology, immunocytochemistry, ELISA, PCR, western blotting) and behavioral experiments in rats, in addition to psychophysical/psychophysiological studies in healthy volunteers and patients. Other psychophysiological research activities are devoted to endogenous pain control systems. In this domain, the team primarily focus on the impact of psychological processes including classical conditioning, expectations, placebo etc.

Prof. Anton has regularly been a reviewer for several scientific journals and was appointed to the editorial board of ISRN Pain in 2012.

( http://suffering-pain.net/legacy/workshop/2009/prof-fernand-anton-workshop-2009/ )