Director

Dr. Mueller aims to transform how migraine and chronic pain are understood and treated, shifting the field from symptom-based classifications to pathophysiology-driven definitions. Through the MAP Lab, she integrates advanced neuroimaging, autonomic testing, and clinical phenotyping to identify mechanisms that drive pain chronification, and evaluates non-pharmacologic therapies, including neuromodulation. This work is designed to identify new therapeutic targets and support precision medicine approaches that match the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Dr. Mueller treats patients at the David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Center for Headache Treatment and Translational Research, where clinical practice and research are closely linked and patients benefit, in real time, from ongoing studies and clinical trials.

The MAP Lab approach builds on Dr. Mueller's bench research on stress and neurodevelopment. Dr. Mueller was among the first to demonstrate how prenatal stress early in pregnancy alters the placenta and developing brain, disrupting key pathways that regulate stress responses, mood, cognition, and metabolism through sex-dependent epigenetic mechanisms. Those findings inform how migraine is studied and treated: not only as a pain disorder, but as a highly individual disorder of repeated stress, shaped by hormones and by each patient’s biology.