What Naked Mole Rats Can Teach Us About Pain
Tate Yawitz has followed his curiosity in biology from spiders in his yard, to scorpions in the desert, to the immunology lab of a pharmaceutical company. Now as a graduate student in the VP&S Neurobiology & Behavior PhD Program, he’s exploring the neurobiology of a peculiar animal—the naked mole rat—whose eccentricities may hold clues to better ways of treating pain in people.
Yawitz was awarded a 2026 Dompe Scholarship for Neuroscience and Neurobiology in September to support his research, conducted in the lab of Ishmail Abdus-Saboor. The international award, previously named the Rita Levi Montalcini Scholarship, supports top graduate students at U.S. universities, with the aim of fostering scientific excellence and encouraging international collaboration.
CUIMC News recently spoke to Yawitz, who’s beginning his third year at VP&S, about his path to neuroscience and his work with naked mole rats.
On developing an interest in science:
I didn't know any scientists growing up—my dad's a parole officer and my mom's a nurse—so I’m often asked how I got interested in science.
But I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in science. As a kid, I would spend my time outside in the woods, catching bugs and feeding spiders. I’ve just always had a love for the natural world.
Growing up, I thought the only realistic way to do science was to be a doctor. But when I got to college, I followed my curiosities into research labs and found my way. It made me realize you don't have to be born into the scientific world to be a part of it. Science really is open to everybody, and I hope more people feel empowered to pursue their own curiosities and take that leap.
Finding a scientific passion:
I find joy in answering scientific questions that could ultimately help people.
At the beginning of my career, I gravitated much more towards ecology and evolutionary biology and was exclusively interested in basic questions about how nature works—understanding biology for the sake of generating new knowledge.
After college, I took a job in industry, characterizing the mechanism of a novel drug, and saw that the work I was doing was helping people in clinical trials. That was a turning point for me.
Between my time as an R&D Scientist in industry and my PhD, I completed a master's program in evolutionary biology, where I worked on different projects in Sweden, France, Germany, and the U.S. Tackling different kinds of research in different countries taught me how to approach complex biological problems from multiple scientific perspectives.
For my PhD, I was really motivated to merge all these experiences—combining my love for evolution, genetics, and behavior with research that helps people live healthier, happier lives, which is how I came to neuroscience.
On studying naked mole rats:
Our lab studies the neurobiology of somatosensation—mainly touch, pain, and brain-body connections. I work on various aspects of these things, with projects in both mice and naked mole rats.
Naked mole rats are unusual mammals that live their entire lives underground. They're one of the only eusocial mammals, which means they are kind of like bees or ants, with a reproductive queen, a breeding male, and workers. Our lab is one of a small few neuroscience labs that study them.
Given their extreme social structure, many members of my lab are interested in understanding the neural basis of their social behaviors and the role that touch plays in their social communication. I'm more interested in their physiological adaptations; for example, they don't feel certain kinds of pain.
In almost all mammals, putting capsaicin—the molecule that makes peppers spicy—onto the skin causes pain. Mole rats are an exception. What's interesting is that their pain neurons, called nociceptors, do fire in response to capsaicin, but the animals do not behave as if they are in pain.
Tate Yawitz studies the unique physiology of naked mole rats to find new ways to treat pain. Photo by Léo Laborieux.
Other researchers have found that their fundamental pain circuitry is actually intact, just functionally disengaged and organized differently. Unlike other mammals, they naturally lack a peripheral neuropeptide called 'Substance P' and their pain neurons project into deeper layers of the spinal cord, potentially connecting to different brain regions.
This brings us to a major challenge in the pain field: disentangling the sensory signal of pain from the emotional experience of suffering. Naked mole rats offer a unique way to study this connection through their behavior. Because they have naturally uncoupled the two—detecting a painful stimulus without displaying the behavioral signs of suffering—I’m working to map the neural circuitry that facilitates this disengagement. If we can figure out exactly what turns that suffering response on and off in their brains, we may discover entirely new ways to treat complex pain conditions in human patients.