Manuela Schmidt has worked on ion channels and their regulation in the context of pain since her postdoctoral stay in the laboratory of Ardem Patapoutian (HHMI, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, USA). In 2012 she established her research group at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine (Goettingen, Germany) with funding from the Emmy Noether-Programme (German Research Foundation, DFG). Since September 2020 she has been a full professor heading the Division of Pharmacology Toxicology at the University of Vienna. Manuela´s laboratory “Systems Biology of Pain” integrates preclinical mouse models and human surrogate models with state-of-the-art quantitative proteomics to tackle mechanisms underlying (chronic) pain states. In this way her laboratory strives to gain mechanistic insights into age- and sex-dependent pain pathology – an endeavor, which lies at the heart of both understanding the molecular signature of chronic pain and identifying novel pain players.