Dr. Catherine Bushnell is the Harold Griffith Professor of Anesthesia and Professor in Dentistry and Neurology at McGill University. She is President-Elect of the Canadian Pain Society and Editor-in-Chief of IASP Press.

She was Director of the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain from 2003-2009. Dr. Bushnell won the Frederick Kerr Award for Basic Research in Pain from the American Pain Society in 2003 and the Distinguished Career Award from the Canadian Pain Society in 2002. In 2009, she was awarded a Canadian Research Chair (Tier I) in Clinical Pain Research.

Dr. Bushnell’s research interests include brain mechanisms of pain processing, psychological modulation of pain, and neural alternations in chronic pain patients. Her recent studies have addressed the impact of chronic pain on the individual’s emotional and cognitive state and underlying changes in the brain that can account for the complex symptoms related to chronic pain.

Dr. Bushnell is now developing rodent models to study the long-term effects of pain on the brain and how stressful life events can impact on the development and maintenance of pain.