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.

Dr. Calvo's research interest is complementary to her clinical work. Her general aim is to better understand the mechanisms behind neuropathic pain. She studies both animal models and patients employing a variety of techniques ranging from transgenic mouse models to human psychophysical studies and genetics. She currently has two active lines: neuropathic pain in dermatological diseases, and pain modulation by potassium channels. Apart from research, Dr. Clavo currently attends a chronic pain patient unit twice a week within the Interdisciplinary Pain Management Team at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Dr. Nahman-Averbuch is an assistant professor of anesthesiology. Dr. Nahman-Averbuch has obtained a B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Haifa as well as an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. During her M.Sc. and Ph.D., she worked with Prof. David Yarnitsky at the Laboratory of Clinical Neurophysiology (Haifa, Israel) and specialized in pain modulation mechanisms in adults with chronic pain. Dr Nahman-Averbuch seeks to promote early career programs and is the past president for the IASP Early Career Network. 

Dr Saurab Sharma is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NeuRA and the UNSW School of Health Sciences. Saurab is supported by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) John J. Bonica Fellowship (2020). Dr Sharma received the Exceptional Thesis Award for his PhD by the University of Otago (2020). Before joining a PhD in 2017, Saurab worked as an educator and musculoskeletal physiotherapist in Nepal for a decade. Saurab has won multiple awards including The Otago Most Promising Pain Research Award (2021) and The UNSW School of Health Sciences Early Career Researcher of the Year Award (2022).

Dr. Michele Sterling is Professor in the Recover Injury Research Centre, Program Lead of the Designing Better Therapies research program and Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence (CRE) in Better Health Outcomes for Compensable Injury. She is a Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist and a Fellow of the Australian College of Physiotherapists. She is internationally recognised for her research on whiplash-associated disorders. Michele’s research focusses on the mechanisms underlying the development of chronic pain after injury, predictive algorithms for outcomes and developing effective interventions for musculoskeletal injury and pain. Michele is an elected member of the leadership Council of IASP.

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.

Dr. Daniela Escobar-Espinal is a Dentist (DDS) from the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) with clinical experience in general dentistry, including volunteer work with Operation Smile Honduras. She completed a Master’s degree in Sciences and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Basic Oral Biology at the University of São Paulo (FORP-USP), Brazil. Her research focuses on the neurophysiology and pharmacology of pain, with particular emphasis on orofacial neuropathic pain and cannabinoids as potential therapeutic strategies for chronic pain. She is an active collaborator of the Orofacial Pain League at FORP-USP and a volunteer of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), serving on the Education Committee and the Mentorship Subcommittee.

David Holloway joined the electronic Persistent Pain Outcomes Collaboration (ePPOC) as Director in May 2022, after an extensive career in both the public and private sector, most recently as Director of Quality and Safety for an Australian community nursing and aged care organisation. ePPOC has been collecting pain outcomes data for more than a decade across Australia and New Zealand and is currently progressing towards the third iteration of its dataset. 

David has held a varied range of operational management and clinical governance roles covering both face-to-face and telehealth delivery models and completed his PhD thesis on the efficacy of virtual environments in increasing competence and confidence of nursing students in relation to medication administration.

Winfried Meissner was appointed Head of Jena University Hospital’s Pain Unit in 1994, and Head of the Palliative Care Department in 2009. The Pain Unit covers all areas of pain management (acute pain service, outpatient service unit, inpatient consultation service, multimodal pain management program, interdisciplinary pain conference). Meissner and his group have initiated two large pain registries, QUIPS in Germany and PAIN OUT international, to improve postoperative pain management and to facilitate health service research. These projects resulted in more than 100 publications, including a couple of landmark papers. He was coordinator of European Commission funded IMIPainCare and subproject PROMPT (Providing Standardized Consented PROMs for Improving Pain Treatment).

In 2020, Winfried received the Robert G. Addison Award by the American Academy of Pain Medicine.

Winfried was President of the German Pain Society from 2021-2022 and Past President from 2023-2024. He is member of several national and international societies including ESAIC and IASP.

Winfried volunteers with the Johanniter Unfallhilfe (St John Ambulance), a humanitarian organisation affiliated with the Brandenburg Bailiwick of the Order of St John. Recently, he  raised funding for PAMELA, a project aiming to prevent and treat phantom limb pain in Ukraine.

Winfried is married and has five children.

Dr. Pfister is a Specialist Anaesthetist at the UCT Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine and the Lead Anaesthetist at Mowbray Maternity Hospital. 

She is also a mom of two beautiful daughters. She is a compassionate, energetic, and dedicated anaesthetist with a passion for teaching, research, and clinical excellence.

She has interests in obstetric anaesthesia, paediatrics, pain management, and is an advocate for working mothers in healthcare. 

She is an active contributor to research with multiple publications and a strong record of mentorship and service improvement.

Jess is a specialist anaesthetist at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town.

Having training in the UK, worked in Australia and specialised in South Africa Jess has seen the healthcare inequalities between countries first hand. She is passionate about improving the patient experience and is a big believer that compassion improves patient outcomes. She can recommend the book "Compassionomics" if you need scientific proof.

Jess's research interests lie in acute pain, obstetrics and healthcare education. Clinically she enjoys being a generalist, but particularly enjoys her work at Red Cross children's hospital and working with other mothers in obstetrics.

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.  

Jeffrey S. Mogil is the E.P. Taylor Professor of Pain Studies and a Distinguished James McGill Professor at McGill University, where he formerly directed the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain. He earned a B.Sc. (Honours) in Psychology from the University of Toronto (1988) and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCLA (1993), completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Portland, Oregon (1993–1996), joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign faculty, and moved to McGill in 2001. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Dr. Mogil is renowned for seminal work in pain genetics, sex differences in pain and analgesia, and algesiometric testing in mice; he authored landmark reviews and edited the first textbook in the field, The Genetics of Pain (IASP Press, 2004). He has published 270+ papers and chapters since 1992, delivered nearly 400 invited lectures, holds an h-index of 100 (Google Scholar), and his work has been cited 40,000+ times; a 2022 Stanford analysis ranked him 7th in Anesthesiology and 210th in Neuroscience worldwide. His research has been supported by NIH, CIHR, NSERC, and leading foundations; current support includes a CIHR Foundation Grant, NSERC Discovery Grant, CIHR Sex and Gender Science Chair, and LAEF. Honors include major awards from IASP, CPS, and APS. He has served as Section Editor (Neurobiology) for Pain, chaired the 13th World Congress on Pain Scientific Planning Committee, sat on the IASP Council, and founded the North American Pain School.

Indra is a psychologist and psychotherapist for 25 years, and a MBDMT therapist and trainer for 10 years.  

Mindfulness based Dance Movement Therapy intervention for chronic pain patient’s self-regulation: results from RCT. 

The Mindfulness based Dance Movement Therapy (MBDMT) intervention was created to address the psycho-emotional difficulties (anxiety, depression, catastrophizing, fear of movement) of chronic pain patients and to develop self-regulation skills. The model on which MBDMT is based was created using grounded theory, then adapted in a pilot study and applied in a randomized controlled trial for chronic pain patients. An intervention group participated in a 10 session DMT process over a 5-week period. In the webinar results from the RCT will be presented: comparison between the intervention and control group with regards to outcome (pain, anxiety and depression) and process (emotion regulation skills and body awareness). Further, the therapeutic mechanisms of the MBDMT model will be discussed.  

Fríða is a practicing physical therapist for 10 years, specializing in pain for 8 years, and diving into trauma and pain 6 years ago.  

A polyvagal theory account of trauma-informed physiotherapy in trauma and chronic pain patients 

The polyvagal theory originated in the description of two complementary vagal pathways, dorsal and ventral, of which the latter is phylogenetically younger and plays an important role in the recovery from trauma. I will introduce the polyvagal theory, from its origin, the biology behind it, and the questions it sought to answer in the 1970‘s and 1980‘s into how it can be applied to assessment and treatment of people with chronic pain and trauma. I will examine clinical presentations i am frequently faced with in my physiotherapy practice and walk through how the polyvagal theory helps me and my clients make sense of their experience and enhance their treatment. 

Iris is a neuroscientist whose research specializes in empathy, emotion recognition and regulation and the role of dance in (neuro)rehabilitation.  

Body (re)affiliation or the double role of the body and movement work in trauma-informed pain rehabilitation 

Based on Fríða’s and Indra’s presentations and backed up by interviews with women having suffered violence on body, emotions, pain and relationships, Iris will round up the seminar by discussing the role of the body in emotion regulation and how body and dance therapies might tap into affect attunement and through a dyadic, interpersonal process help the patient overcome suffering.   

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.