Patrice Forget, MD PhD, is the clinical chair in anesthesia at the University of Aberdeen (UK), and an honorary consultant at the NHS Grampian. He was previously a clinical professor in Anesthesia and Pain Medicine in Belgium, and the president of the Belgian Pain Society. He is involved in clinical research, focused on mainly pain, perioperative epidemiology, and clinical pharmacology. Over the past few years, as a principal investigator and/or national coordinator, he has published more than 150 articles, letters, or editorials. He is also the chair of the PANDOS (Pain AND Opioids after Surgery) ESAIC Research Group (European Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care). 

Louise Trewern is a lived experience advocate who has contributed extensively to improving support for people living with persistent pain. She worked closely with Live Well With Pain, where she helped develop educational resources and shared insights from her own recovery after coming off high-dose prescription opioids. Her work supported others navigating opioid tapering, and she has been a strong advocate for better pain education for the public. Louise promotes self-management approaches that include healthy eating, gentle movement, and reconnecting with life beyond pain. She has served on a number of national committees, including the Physiotherapy Pain Association, and was Vice Chair of the British Pain Society’s Patient Voice Committee. She also contributed to the NICE Guideline Committee NG215 on Medicines Associated with Dependence or Withdrawal, and is a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute at Durham University.

Amy Donnelly, MD, a consultant anesthetist in St. Columcille’s Hospital and St. Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. She obtained her CCST from the College of Anesthesiologists of Ireland in 2020, after which she completed a fellowship in anesthesia in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. She then undertook the first perioperative medicine fellowship in Ireland in St. Vincent’s. Amy is a board member of the Faculty of Pain medicine of Ireland for her work on opioid prescribing in acute pain. She was part of the HSE (Health Service Executive of Ireland) working group for prescribing opioids for acute non-cancer pain. She is currently the FPM board representative on the HSE working group for codeine. Amy was part of the multidisciplinary team involved in the BPS/IPS patient information leaflet on Managing Pain after Surgery.  

Felicia Cox, FRCN, is a nurse consultant in pain management. She is a past chair of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Pain and Palliative Care Forum and is a co-opted member of the Council of the British Pain Society. She is a committee member of the EFIC Covid Task Force and EFIC Research Strategy group, the IASP Acute Pain Special Interest Group, and a founding member of the Pain Nurse Network. She is the co-editor of the British Journal of Pain. The breadth of her pain-related publications spans the continuum from the Daily Telegraph to The Lancet with systematic reviews, chapters, and books in between. She has also co-authored e-learning modules on pain and medicine safety, and has contributed to several Family Practice Management publications. She is an honorary lecturer at King’s College London, UK, and has been awarded honorary membership of the British Pain Society and Fellowship of the RCN for her services to pain. Her clinical and research interests include chronic postsurgical pain and procedural pain, and enjoys supporting novice authors to publish and disseminate their work. 

Joletta Belton is a writer, nature lover, and advocate for the integration of lived expertise into the study, research, and treatment of pain. She came to her advocacy work after years of living with ongoing pain, struggling to find answers, and ‘failing’ all the treatments. She was forced to medically retire from her career as a firefighter paramedic, a profession which had defined her. Through study and a whole lot of experimentation she came to better understand her pain and what to do about it. Joletta has been a patient partner in pain research, clinical guideline development, and health professional education on teams around the world. She was founding co-chair of IASP's Global Alliance of Partners for Pain Advocacy and is the first Patient & Public Partnerships Editor at the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy. She shares her experiences and what she's learned along the way at MyCuppaJo.substack.com

Dr. Barreveld is Medical Director of the Pain Management Services and co-Founder and Director of Education and Outreach for the Substance Use Services (SUS). She is Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at Tufts University School of Medicine, and an Anesthesiologist with Commonwealth Anesthesia Associates at Newton-Wellesley Hospital since 2012. Dr. Barreveld is also a Clinical Researcher at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. She regularly teaches medical students on pain management principles at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University School of Medicine. She graduated from the University of California San Francisco Medical School and completed her Residency in Anesthesiology and Fellowship in Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Her clinical interests are in managing chronic pelvic pain in men and women, acute and chronic postoperative pain, interdisciplinary spine care, safe practices in co-managing pain and addiction, and complex interventional procedures from diagnostic nerve blocks to spinal cord stimulation including dorsal root ganglion stimulation.

Dr. Daniel Buchman is a bioethicist and scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) where he directs the Everyday Ethics Lab. He also serves an associate professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and a member of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics. In addition, he is a member of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Advisory Committee on Ethics and a member of the recently established Bioethics Council for Canada. Dr. Buchman’s research is at the forefront of exploring ethical issues at the intersection of clinical practice and population health, with a particular focus on ethical issues related to mental health, substance use, and chronic pain. His work delves into themes related to stigma, social justice, identity, and compassion, employing a multidisciplinary approach that combines conceptual and empirical methods. He has a strong commitment to advancing ethical practices in healthcare, which continues to shape policies and improve patient care. Some of Dr Buchman’s current projects explore ethical issues related to stigma, chronic pain, and neurotechnologies; industry-healthcare relationships; opioids; psychedelics; palliative psychiatry; and artificial intelligence and digital health.

Dr. Vollert is a chronic pain researcher from Germany, where he did his PhD in neurophysiology at the University of Heidelberg. After six years at Imperial College in London,UK, he has joined the University of Exeter, UK, as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in October 2023.

His background is in data science and statistics, and he collaborates with clinicians across the UK and Europe to analyze multifaceted datasets searching for predictors of developing chronic pain (for example after surgery) and predicting response to treatment to enable personalized pain medicine. He uses a wide array of methods -sensory phenotyping, patient-reported outcomes, -omics – and machine learning to identify mechanistic subgroups.

Liesbet De Baets is an Associate Professor at KU Leuven and a Visiting Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She also holds a clinical position at the Pain Clinic of University Hospital Leuven. Her research focuses on the inflammatory, psychological, and physical activity-related mechanisms involved in the relationship between poor sleep and pain in individuals with low back pain and knee osteoarthritis. She coordinates the PREMEO trial, which investigates the effect of sleep treatments integrated into best-evidence knee osteoarthritis care on pain, sleep, and physical activity.

Patrick H. Finan, Ph.D. is the Harold Carron Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. The Finan Lab focuses broadly on explicating psychological and neurobiological mechanisms of chronic pain. Within that broad domain, Dr. Finan’s team specifically seeks to identify how emotions and pain interact, who evidences characteristics of emotion-related risk and resilience, and when changes in emotions facilitate or inhibit the experience of pain. They employ intensive longitudinal methods to assess behavioral and objective correlates of pain in real time (e.g., sleep; emotions; opioid use; cannabis use), and utilize laboratory-based experimental methods to understand factors influencing pain perception (e.g., sleep deprivation; quantitative sensory testing; fMRI; pharmacological challenge). Additionally, they develop and test novel therapeutic interventions that engage emotion- and sleep-related mechanisms to ameliorate pain and mitigate problematic opioid use.

Nils Runge is a doctoral researcher affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven. He investigates the connection between sleep disturbances and chronic musculoskeletal pain. More specifically, his research examines the consistency of terminology and definitions used to describe sleep issues in this context, the relationships between subjective and objective sleep parameters and pain, and the effects of sleep interventions on pain management.

David Rice is an Associate Professor in the School of Clinical Sciences, and a member of the Pain and Musculoskeletal Conditions Research Group at Auckland University of Technology. For the last decade, he has also held a joint position in the Department of Anaesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at North Shore Hospital in Auckland. David has research interests in the neuromuscular consequences and management of joint injury and arthritis, persistent postsurgical pain and enhanced recovery after surgery. David has received several national and international research awards, is a Past President of the New Zealand Pain Society and is the current Co-Chair of the Musculoskeletal Pain Special Interest Group for the International Association for the Study of Pain. 

Dr. Barry has a background in sensory physiology and bioinformatics, with a focus on pain pathophysiology. After an undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Canada, she did her MSc through the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine, followed by a PhD at the University of Oxford with Prof. David Bennett, looking at the molecular profiling of primary sensory neurons and their role in neuropathic pain. She currently splits her time between the University of Vienna and University of Texas at Dallas using multi-omic methods to understand pain pathophysiology.

Dr. Spisak is Professor of Predictive Neuroscience at the Center for Translational Neuro- and Behavioral Sciences, University Medicine Essen, University Duisburg-Essen. With a background in computer science and neuroimaging, Dr. Spisak leads and contributes to several major research consortia, including the Collaborative Research Centers TRR289 “Treatment Expectation” and SFB1280 “Extinction Learning.” Formerly a Junior Research Group Leader at University Hospital Essen, his career spans roles in academic neuroscience, neuroimaging, and industry research. Recognized with awards such as the Top Young Science Best Paper Award and the German Pain Research Grant, Dr. Spisak specializes in predictive neuroimaging and the neural mechanisms of treatment expectation.

Dr Baskozos is a bioinformatics researcher focused on neuropathic pain, with expertise in transcriptomics, genomics, and predictive modelling. He develops computational pipelines for RNA-seq analysis and collaborates on genome and exome sequencing projects. His current work applies machine learning to clinical data, including projects funded by Diabetes UK and the PAINSTORM initiative. Healso supports experimental design and statistical analysis within David Bennett’s research group.

Lee Ji Kwan (Shawn) is a practicing clinical psychologist specialising in pain management. He is affiliated with Monash University, Malaysia, where he works as a lecturer. In addition, Shawn sits on the Board of Editorial Consultants for the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (IJCEH). Shawn has been working with patients with chronic pain in a multidisciplinary team since 2011 and has developed a deep passion for the psychological management of pain. At Monash University, Malaysia, Shawn’s teaching responsibilities include professional ethics and abnormal psychology.

Tory Madden is a clinical physiotherapist and researcher with a longstanding interest in human health, particularly in the processes that underlie persistent pain and learning. She works at the University of Cape Town as an Associate Professor in the Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine and the Neuroscience Institute and is involved in Groote Schuur Hospital’s interdisciplinary Chronic Pain Clinic. She holds a ‘Y’ scientist rating from the South African National Research Foundation and currently receives funding from the US National Institutes of Health, through a K43 Emerging Global Leader award. She aims to focus her research on identifying contributors to persistent pain that can be targeted therapeutically to decrease and prevent persistent pain.  Tory is active in several IASP task forces and councillor of the South African chapter of IASP.

Bamidele Victor Owoyele is a basic researcher in the field of pain and neuroscience. He specializes in neurophysiology, sensory neuroscience looking at pain transmission and factors that could mitigate it. Victor has been involved in evaluating the effects of the rich West African Flora as used traditionally on the amelioration of pain in rodent models of acute and chronic pain as well as inflammation. He is also involved in modeling neuroinflammatory diseases such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, and in evaluating pain and inflammation in clinical settings with his collaborators. He is the President of the Society for the Study of Pain Nigeria (SSPN) and the Chair of the Fellowships Grants and Award Working Group of the IASP.

Pablo Brumovsky is Associate Professor in the Institute of Research in Translational Medicine, where he leads the lab of Mechanisms and Therapeutic Innovation in Pain. His lab is currently focused on the characterization of the mechanisms of anti-nociceptive and anti-inflammatory actions of the oligodeoxynucleotide IMT504, in particular in relation to its modulation of mesenchymal stromal cells and cells in the immune system. As such, the interaction between these non-neuronal cells and primary afferent and spinal neurons involved in the transmission of pain is also a focus of attention in his lab.  

Dr. Brumovsky is also Associate Dean at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences in Austral University, and an Editorial Committee member of the Pain Research Forum. He is currently the Chair of the Financial Aid Task Force of the IASP.

Gauhar Afshan is a Professor at Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan. She completed her MBBS at Dow Medical College of Karachi in 1990. She completed her FCPS (Anaesthesiology) at College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan in 1996. Her international experience includes various programs, contributions and participation in different countries for diverse fields of study.  Her research interests reflect in her wide range of publications in various national and international journals.  She is the Editorial Board Member of Journals and serves as a member of various associations, apart from being an author for many books.

Dr. Lutful Aziz is an Anesthesiologist and pain management expert at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. With over 30 years of experience and advanced training from Japan, he specializes in surgical anesthesia, chronic pain relief, and critical care services. His expertise ensures safe surgical procedures and effective recovery plans for patients.

Dr. Xavier Falieres was born in France, where he completed his studies in general medicine and emergency medicine. Seeking broader expertise, he pursued further specialization in anesthesiology in Belgium. In 1993, he moved to The Netherlands, and since 2002, he has been working as a peri-operative anesthesiologist at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital — a prominent teaching hospital near Rotterdam.

Currently, Dr. Falieres serves as the Medical Director of Ambulatory Care at this hospital and is also the President of the Dutch Society for Ambulatory Care.

Robyna I. Khan is committed to advancing healthcare through education, bioethics, and clinical innovation. With over two decades of experience, she's led initiatives such as launching a Master of Bioethics program, establishing an Acute Pain Service, Ultrasound-guided regional anaesthesia and pioneering tools like the Pain Toolkit in Urdu to enhance patient education globally. Her journey is defined by a dedication to academic excellence, ethical leadership, and impactful clinical practice. She holds advanced degrees in medicine, anesthesiology, and bioethics, and her contributions span research, curriculum development, and teaching across all levels—from technicians to PhD candidates.

Forthcoming.

Dr. Abhijit Nair currently works at the Department of Anaesthesiology, Ibra Hospital, Sultanate of Oman. His areas of interest are acute pain, regional anesthesia, perioperative care, Onco-anesthesia.

Dr. Ana Laura Schwartzmann Bruno is an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay. A specialist in pain medicine and regional anesthesia, she leads initiatives in acute and chronic pain management and advocates for gender balance in anesthesia. Dr. Schwartzmann Bruno is President of LASRA, serves on the WFSA Pain Committee, and frequently lectures at international conferences. She is widely published and actively involved in editorial and peer review work in anesthesiology and pain medicine.

Ruth Zaslansky, DSc. Trained as a pain neurophysiologist. Currently Scientific Director of PAIN OUT, an international quality improvement and research network working to improve management of postoperative management.  PAIN OUT has been involved in many projects in low resource countries – working with local healthcare providers to assess  pain-related patient reported outcomes, treatments for post-operative pain and implement quality improvement projects.  In IASP, Ruth is secretary of the Pain Registry SIG.  

Kirsty is Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Imperial College London. Her research bridges preclinical and clinical approaches to investigate descending pain modulation in chronic pain. She has held academic positions at UCL and King’s College London, and received the EFIC IBSA Prize (2017), IASP Patrick D. Wall Award (2022), and British Pain Society Wall Award (2023). Kirsty is the current IASP World Congress on Pain Scientific Program Chair.  She also serves on editorial boards including Pain and British Journal of Pharmacology, and holds leadership roles within the British Pain Society, and EFIC.

Nadia is a Research Fellow at the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information Centre (EPPI Centre) within the Social Science Research Unit. Her research interests focus on automation tools and methods for evidence synthesis and systematic reviewing. She has a background in pharmacology and experience conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses to narrow the translation gap between preclinical and clinical research of chronic pain.

Josephine is a Musculoskeletal physiotherapist and chronic pain researcher. She joined LSBU in 2021, as a lecturer in physiotherapy within the Institute of Health and Social Care. She completed her MSc in Physiotherapy from Sheffield Hallam University in 2014 and completed her PhD titled; “Chronic Low Back Pain: A Representation of Liminality in Illness Identity and Professional Identity” at the University of Nottingham in 2022.

Professor Markus Ploner investigates how the human brain generates the experience of pain. His interdisciplinary research group employs methods such as electroencephalography (EEG) and non-invasive brain stimulation to understand how the brain processes pain in healthy individuals and in people with chronic pain. The aim is to develop new approaches for the diagnosis and treatment of chronic pain. His research is guided by the principles of open, reproducible science and actively involves people with chronic pain in the research process.

Professor Ploner studied medicine in Cologne and Vienna and received his doctorate from the University of Cologne. He began his research career at the University Hospital Düsseldorf, where he also completed his specialist training in neurology. In 2007/2008, he conducted research at the University of Oxford as a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Since then, he has been working at the Department of Neurology at TUM. In 2014, he was appointed Professor of Human Pain Research, and in 2024, he became Head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Pain Medicine at the TUM University Hospital.

Dr. Franziska Denk leads the Denk lab, which studies the peripheral nervous system and its involvement in chronic pain conditions. Her group is particularly interested in why pain persists over long periods of time and is exploring the role of neuroimmune interactions and epigenetic mechanisms in this context. Their favourite tools include transgenic models and high-throughput molecular analyses on sorted cell populations (scRNAseq, ChIP-seq, CUT&Tag, ATAC-seq). They also work with induced pluripotent stem cell derived models of peripheral neurons.

She is also Co-Director of a Wellcome Trust PhD Training Scheme in Neuroimmune Interactions and in general, her team is looking to promote interdisciplinary research in an open and positive environment. They enjoy sharing data, and engage with other researchers and the public on a regular basis. 

An Honorary Life Member of the British Psychological Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Dr. Branney excels at challenging projects that have an impact. Dr. Branney has undertaken a programme of award winning, internationally leading work exploring how to improve experiences of healthcare through interventions that are local, proximal and distal to patients' interactions with services. Dr. Branney co-authored the UK Department for Health report, ‘The Gender & Access to Services Study’ and led the first national study of Patients’ Experiences of Penile Cancer (PEPC), which is published on the award winning www.healthtalk.org and featured on BBC Radio 4s Inside Health, the BPS Impact Portal, and The Guardian. Dr. Branney has over 100 peer-reviewed outputs and in the field of penile cancer and quality of life, four of his papers are in the top ten by citations per year. Dr. Branney is leading work exploring the possibilities of open science for qualitative methods, which includes one of the earliest studies into the topic, keynotes at the Qualitative Methods in Psychology section of the British Psychological Society biennial conference and the UK Research Integrity annual conference, videos and a paper introducing key issues, a special issue in the British Journal of Social Psychology and a number of invited seminars, one of which was recorded and has been viewed of 1,500 times. A student-focused educator, Dr. Branney has received awards from student bodies for his teaching in social psychology. Additionally, Dr. Branney has been an external examiner for undergraduate single and joint honours psychology programmes in the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore, and regularly receive invites to be an external expert for periodic reviews and an external examiner for doctorates.

Dr. Soliman is a Research Fellow at the EPPI Centre, University College London. Her background is in pharmacology and her PhD focused on improving the feasibility, efficiency and accuracy of systematic reviews while asking questions of neurobiological importance. She is now working on DESTINY - a Wellcome funded consortium - developing digital evidence synthesis tools for the responsible use of AI and automation for evidence synthesis and policy making in climate and health. A proponent of open research practices, her research has provided empirical evidence that highlights the impact of the lack of open and transparent reporting, and she is committed to improving the integrity and trustworthiness of pain research. She is a UK Reproducibility Local Network Lead and serves on the Journal of Pain as an Openness and Transparency Editor. She also has an interest in sharing her military experiences and knowledge of leadership development to engender a more positive research culture. 

Dr Aidan Cashin (PhD, BExPhys) is a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, Deputy Director of the Centre for Pain IMPACT at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) and a Conjoint Senior Lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Prior to commencing research, Aidan pursued a successful clinical career as an Accredited Exercise Physiologist, practicing primarily in the field of chronic musculoskeletal pain.