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The International Association for the Study of Pain
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Dr. Rebecca Pillai Riddell (she/her)

Full Professor and Tier 1 York Research Chair in Pain and Mental Health - York University

Professional Bio

Dr. Pillai Riddell  is the Tier 1 York Research Chair in Pain and Mental Health and Director of the Opportunities to Understand Childhood Hurt Laboratory (OUCH Lab ; www.yorku.ca/ouchlab) in the Department of Psychology of York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  She  is also a registered clinical psychologist, focused on work in perinatal mental health,  infant mental health, and chronic pain.  As both a basic behavioural scientist and a clinician-scientist, Dr. Pillai Riddell leads a multi-national research program that studies parents and children during stressful painful procedures. Her research is funded by all three national Canadian research councils (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council). She has also been involved extensively in supporting EDI initiatives in research contexts at both the institutional and federal levels and is the Nominated Principal Investigator for DIVERT Mental Health- a multi-million dollar CIHR-funded national training program in setting out to disrupt the Canadian mental health system by innovating curriculum for mental health trainees that focuses on more diverse knowledges and leverages technology to make services accessible to more Canadians (divertmentalhealth.ca). DIVERT Mental Health is partnered with IBM Canada and more than 30 other academic, industry, and NGO organizations across Canada.  Pillai Riddell is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.  She was also recently awarded the 2020 Canadian Pain Society’s Outstanding Mentorship Award and the 2019 American Pain Society’s Jeffrey Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain.

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