Vitaly Napadow, Roberta Sclocco, Jeungchan Lee, Junhwan Lee and Sarasa Tohyama recently traveled to Seoul, South Korea, to attend the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) conference. With former OHBM chair Randy Hirschtick as a close mentor and collaborator, and with our strong ties to the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine, this trip was especially rewarding and meaningful.

Our team presented several posters focused on our research, including “Synchronized dual-brain fMRI investigating the patient-clinician relationship in chronic pain,” “Trigeminal Nerve Diffusivity is Associated with Migraine Features in Patients with Episodic Migraine,” and “Migraine frequency is inversely correlated with insula response to an interoceptive attention task.” Our presentations sparked great discussions and we learned about other labs’ cutting-edge research.

Beyond the conference halls, the team enjoyed reconnecting in person with past collaborators from the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (KIOM), on the other side of the world. Our lab members also visited Jeungchan’s family distillery to sample some sogokju. As a parting gift, the group brought back a bottle of the wine for everyone to try at our next lab meeting, guaranteeing that our next gathering will be as spirited as the discussions at OHBM!