With his wife, Fredia, he then emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1979 where he held medical and research positions first at Middlesex Hospital and then at University College London (UCL), working at the latter initially under the tutelage of Patrick D.
[1] Using subtractive hybridization and microarrays his laboratory and research teams demonstrated the involvement of hundreds of genes in pain-related conditions, collaborated in the cloning of a novel nociceptor-specific sodium channel, described the intracellular signaling pathways and ion channel/receptors that mediate central sensitization and shown that cyclo-oxygenase is produced in the spinal cord by peripheral inflammation.
[2] Dr Woolf is also deputy director of the Intellectual Developmental Disability Disorders Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-director of the neuroscience program of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
At Boston Children’s Hospital Woolf has pioneered the use of human stem cell neurons to study pain, ALS and regeneration.
He was awarded the Magnes medal in Israel in 2013 and selected to deliver the FE Bennett Memorial Lecture by the American Neurological Association in 2012.