Congratulations to our essay winners!
Every year the PRF hosts an essay competition inviting medical, physiotherapy, nursing, occupational therapy, and clinical psychology students to submit an essay on an aspect of chronic pain. This year the standard was high, and three essays were selected by Fintan Conway, Vernon Fernandes and Samuel Brown
Talk titles:
Fintan Conway: Rethinking Pain: The Gut Microbiome as a Novel Target in Inflammatory Arthritis
Vernon Fernandes: Digital Twins & Artificial Intelligence: Redefining Equitable Chronic Pain Management
Samuel Brown: The ‘Gut–Brain–Pain Axis’ in Chronic Migraine: The Therapeutic Role of Diet and Probiotics
More about the speakers and the talks:
Fintan Conway is a third-year medical student at the University of Edinburgh, currently intercalating in Endocrinology at Imperial College London. He has a keen interest in surgery and pain medicine inspired by his own experience living with a chronic pain condition. His talk will explore the emerging evidence linking the gut microbiome to pain modulation, specifically focusing on how lifestyle factors can shape the microbiome to serve as an adjunct for improving pain outcomes.
Vernon Fernandes is a 2nd year MBBS student at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry with a strong academic interest in chronic pain, neurobiology, and health technology innovation. Prior to medicine, he has read Biomedical Sciences BSc at the University of Kent establishing a research-oriented grounding in the sciences and hopes to take his expertise to a clinical setting in the future. His talk explores how current care pathways for chronic pain are often reactive, fragmented, and heavily reliant on pharmacological therapies, including opioids, with limited long-term benefit and significant harm. This talk explores how artificial intelligence and digital twin technology could enable a shift towards predictive, personalised, and equitable chronic pain management. Drawing on advances in neurobiology, central sensitisation, and the biopsychosocial model of pain, the presentation outlines how virtual patient models such as Digital Twin technology integrates clinical, physiological, and psychosocial data to anticipate pain flare-ups and simulate treatment responses. The potential benefits, ethical challenges, data governance issues, and limitations of clinical translation within NHS settings will be critically examined, with a focus on how such technologies could support multidisciplinary pain care.
Samuel Brown
is a graduate-entry medical student at the University of Cambridge. Prior to medicine, he studied English Literature and subsequently worked in foreign and health policy. He hopes to specialise in paediatrics, and has subspecialty interests in neurology, critical care, and the effects of climate change on child health. Sam’s essay explores the emerging science of the ‘gut–brain–pain axis’ and argues that chronic migraine may be driven as much by gut health as by the brain. Drawing on patient experience and growing biomedical evidence, it examines how diet, the microbiome, and probiotics may influence neuroinflammation and pain pathways, opening the door to more personalised, disease-modifying approaches to migraine treatment.
Presentations of their essay will be available on our website shortly.