Clifford J. Woolf, MB, BCh, PhD
Keynote Lecture: Spontaneous Neuropathic Pain
Dr. Clifford J. Woolf was born in South Africa, where he earned his MB, BCh, and Ph.D. degrees. He moved to London in 1979 and became a Professor of Neurobiology at University College London in 1991. In 1997 he was recruited by the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School to serve as the Richard J. Kitz Professor of Anesthesiology Research and director of the Neural Plasticity Research Group. In 2010 he was named director of the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and became a Professor of Neurology and Neurobiology at HMS as well as the Blackfan-Diamond Chair of Neuroscience at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is faculty both in the department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and in the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He received a Kerr award from the American Pain Society in 2015, a Gill Distinguished Scientist award and the Reeve-Irvine medal in 2017, and in 2020 Dr. Woolf was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded a Doctoris Honoris Causa from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2025, he got the Gold-Haythornwaite Lifetime Achievement award from the United States Association for the Study of Pain and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He has published over 340 research papers on molecular, cellular, and systems neurobiology and has 37 issued patents. He has an h-index of 175 and 140,000 citations. His research is devoted to investigating how the functional, chemical, and structural plasticity of neurons is involved in both the normal adaptive functions of the nervous system and in maladaptive changes that contribute to neurological diseases, with a particular focus on pain, regeneration, and neurodegeneration, and on the exploitation of stem cell derived neurons to model disease and for drug screening. Dr. Woolf has founded several companies.
Beth Darnall, PhD
Keynote Lecture
As a clinical pain psychologist and scientist, Dr. Darnall has dedicated her career to developing and investigating brief, scalable, and effective interventions for acute and chronic pain relief, and to safely reduce prescription opioids and related iatrogenics. Dr. Darnall is Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine where she directs the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab. As a NIDA-funded pain and opioid research mentor, Dr. Darnall enjoys mentoring junior investigators to further their scientific goals and careers. As a behavioral pain treatment clinical trials specialist and principal investigator (PI), she leads multiple active NIH and PCORI-funded multi-site and national comparative efficacy and pragmatic comparative effectiveness randomized pain treatment trials involving a combined 3,200 Americans.