Almost 50 years of the Canadian Pain Society
A multidisciplinary approach to pain in Canada.
The Canadian Pain Society connects healthcare professionals, scientists, researchers, policymakers, and people with lived experience through evidence-based education. Our purpose is to drive innovation through advancement and advocacy and revolutionize access and care for those living with chronic pain.

What We Value

Through education and connection, we work to bridge gaps between organizations and individuals across Canada to share insights and resources about chronic pain management. The Canadian Pain Society works with healthcare providers, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to ensure that Canadians living with pain have access to quality care and support.
01
Collaboration
Leveraging the power of national understanding, relationships, and education to deliver exceptional management and tools to those who live in pain.
02
Connection
Hearing diverse perspectives fuels innovation, deepens connections between people, and drives growth as an organization.
03
Education
The foundation that helps us nurture and develop cutting-edge modalities in pain research and management.
04
Research
Upholding integrity in science through objectivity, accountability, and stewardship. We further the academic study of evidence-based abstracts for professionals and people in pain.
05
Advocacy
Preserving human dignity, patient equality, and freedom from suffering. Advocacy for our vulnerable populations is done every time we step into our professional role.
06
Mentorship
Providing the opportunity to create mentor-mentee relationships that foster personal and professional development.
Our History

The Canadian Pain Society/Société Canadienne de la Douleur (a chapter of the International Association for the Study of Pain) has been a leader in chronic pain research, education, and advocacy since our inauguration in 1974.
It's a feature of the almost 50-year history that the Society has retained the Chapter’s core belief of fostering an all-inclusive national network of multi-disciplinary members. Championed by a history of distinguished presidents from a wealth of disciplines, we continually cultivate our contributions to evidence-based education in the face of ongoing voids in health care.

President
Dr. John Xavier Pereira
MD CM CCFP
Immediate Past President of the Pain Society of Alberta and was a Founding Co-Chair of the Alberta Pain Strategy. He is a past Ronald Melzack Fellow of the McGill Pain Center and has spoken on the topic of chronic pain both nationally and internationally, including at the Centers for Disease Control, ANZCA Auckland, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Mayo Clinic. He represented Western Canada on the committee of physicians who wrote our country’s National Guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of fibromyalgia. Dr. John Pereira was the physician lead of FibroFOCUS, an interdisciplinary chronic pain program that won a 2016 Patient Experience Award from the Health Quality Council of Alberta. He is a member of the Canadian Pain Task Force's External Advisory Panel and has personally visited more than fifty pain clinics worldwide to learn best practices.

President Elect
Dr. Hance Clarke
MD PhD FRCPC
Director of Pain Services and the Pain Research Unit at the Toronto General Hospital (TGH). He is the Knowledge Translation Chair for the University of Toronto Centre For the Study of Pain and an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Toronto. As a clinician-scientist, Dr. Clarke has played a leading role in educating the public about pain control, alternatives to opioids, and the need for further studies on the beneficial and adverse effects of cannabis. He is a champion of evidence-based solutions for the opioid crisis and an advocate for a national pain and addictions strategy. He has authored over 100 peer reviewed publications and has been invited to speak on pain control, cannabis and the opioid crisis to the House of Commons in Ottawa, Canada and elsewhere around the world. He has won numerous awards including the 2016 Early Career Award from the Canadian Pain Society and the 2019 US Mayday Pain and Society Fellowship in recognition of his outstanding research and commitment to improving pain care.

Treasurer
Dr. Nivez Rasic
BSc MD FRCPC
Dually-trained FRCPC pediatric anesthesiologist and pain medicine specialist and a Clinical Associate Professor with the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative & Pain Medicine at the University of Calgary. She has the privilege of serving as the Medical Lead of the Vi Riddell Pediatric Pain Program at the Alberta Children’s Hospital (Calgary, Canada), which received the prestigious international ChildKind designation for its excellence in pediatric pain management in 2019. The Vi Riddell pain program is recognized as a leader in pediatric pain, involving a partnership with clinical care and pediatric pain research, as well as specialized programming such as the intensive pain rehabilitation program (IIPT) for adolescents, which was the first to launch in Canada in 2014. Dr. Rasic is a researcher and educator and has the privilege of serving as the Acute Pain Lead on the Alberta Pain Strategy. Her clinical work involves providing anesthesia for children and managing acute, complex and chronic pain in youth. Dr. Rasic was a 2020-21 US Mayday Pain Fellow.

Secretary
Massieh Moayedi
PhD
Massieh Moayedi did his undergraduate at the University of Ottawa in Biology (in the French speaking program). He then received his PhD in Pain NeuroImaging under the supervision of Dr. Karen Davis, where he investigated brain abnormalities in individuals with chronic orofacial pain. His postdoctoral research at University College London was under the supervision of Dr. Giandomenico Iannetti, where he investigated electrocortical correlates of pain. Massieh is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry (tenured in July 2023), a University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of Pain Scientist and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Pain NeuroImaging. He has received an IASP Early Career Research Award, and holds funding from NFRF, NSERC, CIHR, Ontario, CFI, and NIH. He is very collaborative, and works with groups across Canada, the United States and Europe. He serves the pain community both locally, nationally, and internationally: he is an Editorial Board member of PAIN and PAIN Reports, serves on several CPS committees, is co-chair of the IASP NeuroImaging of Pain SIG, and runs the international Human Pain Seminar Series. He is a strong believer in community and mentorship and supporting trainees achieve their goals, championing EDI principles. Massieh, who has chronic pain resulting from cancer treatment, uses brain imaging to study the mechanisms of acute and chronic pain in pediatric and adult populations. Specifically, his research uses a biopsychosocial lens to understand the contributions and interactions of these domains to the pain experience.

Chair, Scientific Committee
Dr. Mike Hildebrand
PhD
Completed his PhD in cellular neuroscience in Terry Snutch’s lab at UBC. Following this, Dr. Hildebrand pursued an industrial R&D fellowship at Zalicus Pharmaceuticals in Vancouver, where he developed a rodent spinal cord recording assay for Zalicus’ preclinical pain research program. To further expand his expertise in spinal pain processing, Dr. Hildebrand then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Mike Salter’s lab at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Hildebrand is now leading a translational pain research program as an Associate Professor at Carleton University, where his team is studying both acute and chronic pain processing using animal and human tissue pain models.

Editor-in-Chief, Canadian Journal of Pain
Dr. Joel Katz
PhD
Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair in Health Psychology at York University. He is the Research Director of the Pain Research Unit and Research Lead at the Transitional Pain Service in the Department of Anesthesia and Pain Management at the Toronto General Hospital, and a Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Pain, the official journal of the Canadian Pain Society. He has received many awards for research excellence including the Distinguished Career Award from the Canadian Pain Society and the Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science from the Canadian Psychological Association. He has published more than 300 articles and book chapters and has more than 32,000 citations and an h-index of 84. Dr. Katz has made scholarly contributions to the field of phantom limb pain, pre-emptive and preventive analgesia, and, along with Dr. Hance Clarke established the world’s first Transitional Pain Service. Dr. Katz’s research program is aimed, broadly, at understanding the psychological, emotional, and biomedical risk/protective factors involved in acute and chronic pain with an emphasis on the transition of acute, time-limited pain to chronic, pathological pain after surgery, accidents, and spinal cord injury.

Awards and Grants Committee
Dr. Anna Taylor
PhD
A Canada Research Chair in Pain and Addiction and an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology. She completed her doctoral degree at the McGill Pain Center in 2011, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of California, Los Angeles in the NIH-funded Opioid Research Center. Her expertise spans the fields of opioid addiction and chronic pain. Dr. Taylor’s research program engages a broad range of disciplines including pharmacology, microbiology, genetics, and animal behaviour to provide mechanistic insight into how affective circuitry contributes to pain and addiction. Her research strives to understand how chronic pain changes affective brain circuits and whether these changes alter the effects of opioids. She explores strategies to improve opioid efficacy while minimizing addiction risk. Finally, she is developing novel, non-addicting opioid agonists to treat pain without abuse liability. This research comes at a critical juncture when safe and effective chronic pain management is increasingly challenging amidst the opioid overdose epidemic. Dr. Taylor’s research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes for Health, the American Pain Society, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Pain Society, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Our Executive Committee
Our 2022-2024 Executive Committee is made up of innovative and experienced healthcare professionals, scientists, and researchers who strive to uphold and maintain the integrity of the Canadian Pain Society as dedicated volunteers.

PWLE Committee
Virginia McIntyre
President and Executive Director of the People In Pain Network (PIPN). She developed persistent pain in 2009 after a shoulder surgery. Virginia holds a BA in Community Studies, a diploma in Radiological and Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and completed multiple courses in leadership development. She works extensively as lived experience partner on research projects and is a proud member on several other committees which include; Pain Canada National Advisory Committee, Canadian Pain Society Communication committee, Atlantic Mentorship Network Advisory Committee and other pain related initiatives. Virginia is a public presenter focusing on pain related topics with a committed diligence to increase awareness on chronic pain.

Scientific Program Committee
Dr. Gabrielle Page
A clinical psychologist and pain researcher in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the Université de Montréal. She is also a scientist at the Research Center of the Centre hospitalier du Université de Montréal. She is a Junior 1 research scholar from the Fonds de recherche du Québec en santé. She is a member of the scientific committee of the strategic initiative on low back pain and co-leads the strategic initiative on the judicious use of opioids of the Quebec Pain Research Network. Her line of research examines the bidirectional associations between stress and pain, the trajectories from acute to chronic pain, and the impact of mental and physical comorbidities on chronic pain treatment response. She has authored more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles and 6 book chapters. She is the recipient of the 2018 Early Career Investigator Pain Research Grant from the Canadian Pain Society.

EDI Committee
Dr. Rebecca Pillai Riddell
Dr. Pillai Riddell's interest in the caregiver-child relationship began as an undergraduate student at York University and has continued through her graduate research training career at the University of British Columbia, Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto. She currently is involved with two primary lines of research and participates in the leadership of other programs with colleagues from across the country.

Newsletter Committee
Dr. Mike Wong
Completed his Anesthesiology residency at Dalhousie University, followed by an Obstetric Anesthesiology fellowship at the University of Maryland. He is now undertaking further training in Pain Medicine at Western University and plans to practice in Atlantic Canada as a chronic pain physician and anesthesiologist. His interests include opioid-sparing anesthesia, acute postoperative and transitional pain, and interventional pain medicine. Mike is a recipient of the Detweiler Travelling Fellowship from the Royal College of Physician and Surgeons. His other pursuits include scientific communication, design, medical humanities, and history of medicine. He is also an active member of the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society, having served on its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Working Group as well as its Standards Committee, and currently is Chair of its Archives and Artifacts Committee.

CPS+ Webinar Committee
Dr. Nader Ghasemlou
An Associate Professor at Queen’s University, where he leads the Pain Chronobiology & Neuroimmunology Lab (ghasemloulab.ca) and serves as Director of Translational Pain Research at the Hotel-Dieu Hospital Chronic Pain Clinic. His research team works at the intersection of neuroimmunology, pain physiology, and circadian biology. Using various animal models of tissue injury and disease, including multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, postoperative wounds, and neuropathic nerve injury, the team seeks to better understand the molecular, cellular, and systems responses underlying human disease. The group is particularly focused on dissecting mechanisms underlying the generation and maintenance of inflammation in the central and peripheral nervous system. All projects in the lab include bioinformatics component to identify genes/pathways regulating cell function, and patient cohort studies which provide a translational component to our work. Nader completed his PhD at McGill University and was a CIHR Banting Fellow at Harvard Medical School. He is recipient of a CPS/Pfizer Early Career Award, a Brain Canada Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research Award, and the Canadian Anesthesiology Society’s New Investigator Award. Projects in the Pain Chronobiology & Neuroimmunology Lab are currently funded by grants from CIHR, NSERC, the MS Society of Canada, and the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation. Nader also serves on the CPS Scientific Program and Membership & Engagement Committees; is co-chair of the Knowledge Translation Committee and sits on the Executive of the CIHR-SPOR Chronic Pain Network; and is a member of the Education & Training Committee of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada’s endMS Training Program.

Trainee Representative
Dr. Emmanuel Abreu
An international medical doctor with a Master’s degree in Bioethics. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Public Health with a concentration on Epidemiology. Emmanuel has a vested interest in medical equality for all, and has dedicated his professional career in this pursuit. For the past five years, his work to improve the quality of care to vulnerable populations included the development of clinical campaigns providing assistance to under-serviced areas around Latin-America. Specifically, he collaborated with a team coordinating multi-centric clinical trials and projects for HIV and Hepatitis B treatment research and development. This work was sponsored by the government of the United States of America and a number of pharmaceutical associates. Emmanuel firmly believes that the best medicine is prevention, and the cornerstone of his career goals has always been to make this medical care accessible to all. Having now found his new home in Canada with CHANGEpain Clinic, he looks forward to working towards their mission as Research Director. Emmanuel is the project lead for the Doctors of BC Surgical Patients Optimization Collaborative. CHANGEpain has been chosen as one of 18 multi-disciplinary teams and is the only community based clinic as part of the ambitious 3 year initiative to improve post-op patient outcomes. CHANGEpain is examining the prehabilitation and early intervention strategies in collaboration with Dr. Kelly Mayson’s team at Vancouver General Hospital.

Interprofessional Special Interest Group
Dr. Timothy Wideman
A physiotherapist and associate professor at McGill University. The overarching goal of his work as a clinician, educator and researcher has been to improve the clinical care offered to people living with persistent pain. He has aimed to cultivate a comprehensive perspective on pain throughout his training and clinical experience. He completed his entry-level physiotherapy training in 2003 and has practiced across a range of clinical settings, including homecare, private clinics and multi-disciplinary pain management programs. Driven by his interest in better understanding how psychological and neurophysiological factors relate to pain and disability, he completed his doctoral training in McGill’s experimental psychology program and focused his post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins on the clinical assessment of pain sensitization. He joined McGill faculty in 2014 and his recent work has focused on understanding pain-related suffering and working to improve entry-level pain education for physiotherapy students across Canada. Dr. Wideman has received several national awards for excellence in research and clinical education, including a New Investigator Award from CIHR, as well Knowledge Translation and Mentor Awards from the Canadian Physiotherapy Association.

Neuropathic Pain Management Special Interest Group
Dr. Anuj Bhatia
An Associate Professor at University of Toronto and Clinical Director, Acute and Chronic Pain Services at Toronto Western Hospital (TWH). He is also the Chair of the Neuropathic Pain SIG of the CPS, Treasurer of the Canadian Neuromodulation Society, and one of five voting members of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons’ Pain Medicine Specialty committee. His clinical and research interests include use of wearable technology and epidemiological tools for assessing outcomes of treatments for pain, fluoroscopy and ultrasound-guided procedures for chronic neuropathic, musculoskeletal, and cancer pain, and neuromodulation. He has published over 50 papers, six book chapters, and co-authored two books on ultrasound-guided interventional pain procedures. Dr. Bhatia a member of the Editorial Board of Anesthesia & Analgesia, the European Journal of Pain, and Pain Medicine. He is also an Examiner for certification examinations of the World Institute of Pain and the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine.

Interventional Pain Management Special Interest Group
Dr. Harsha Shanthanna
An anesthesiologist and chronic pain physician working at St. Joseph’s hospital, Hamilton and an Associate Professor in Anesthesia, at McMaster University. He is also the Associate Chair, Research, Department of Anesthesia, and Research Director for the Pain Residency program at McMaster University. He is the present Chair, Interventional SIG, for the CPS, and has served in this role for the last five years. Harsha’s pain practice includes both interventional and non-interventional approaches, including neurostimulation. His research areas include optimizing perioperative pain, chronic pain management, persisting post-surgical pain, and the use of cannabis for pain. Harsha has been the recipient of many research awards including the Trainee Research Award, Canadian Pain Society (CPS-2011), Carl Koller Memorial Research Grant by American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine (ASRA- 2016), and the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society (CAS) Career Scientist Award-2018. Harsha has published more than 70 peer reviewed publications, one i-book and seven book chapters.
Our Leadership Team
Our Leadership Teams are made up of healthcare professionals, scientists, researchers and individuals living with chronic pain who are committed to advocating for better access to quality care and maintain the integrity of the Canadian Pain Society as dedicated volunteers.
Chair - Virginia McIntyre
Vice Chair - Jennifer Daly Cyr
Keith Meldrum
Chair - Anna Taylor
Vice Chair - Nader Ghasemlou
President - John Pereira
President Elect - Hance Clark
Secretary - Massieh Moayedi
Treasurer - Nivez Rasic
Clinical Science Rep - Tim Salomons
Basic Science Rep - Arkady Khoutorsky
Trainee Rep - Emmanual Abreu
Nicole Alberts
Emeralda Burke
Zoha Deldar
Giannina Descalzi
Natasha Gallant
Michelle Gagnon
Gabrielle Pagé
Laurie Proulx
Reza Sharif Naeini
Perri Tutelman
Judy Watt-Watson
Chair - Andrea Furlan
Co-Chair - Adriana Angarita
Fiona Campbell
Mike Hildebrand
John Pereira
Lynn Gauthier
Mike Wong
Emmanuel Abreu
Virginia Mcintyre
Courtney Bannerman
Carlos Gevers
Louise Castillo
Tara Moss
Co-Chair - Rebecca Pillai Riddell
Co-Chair - TBD
Emmanuel Abreu
Caroline Arbour
Hélène Beaudry
Mélanie Bérubé
Karen Davis
Giannina Descalzi
Teresa Evans
Elise Kammerer
Therese Lane
Massieh Moayedi
Ria Nishikawara
Sandra Woods
Dave Walton
Chair - Michael Hildebrand
Vice Chair - Gabrielle Page
Javeria Hashmi
Massieh Moayedi
Hance Clarke
Raj Khanna
Giannina Descalzi
Jillian Vinall Miller
Luda Diatchenko
Karen Davis
Geoff Bostick
Anuj Bhatia
Susan Tupper
Katie Birnie
Bruce Hollett
Lydia Hatcher
Irina Kudrina
Jonathan Hudon
Erika Harding
Carmen-Edith Bellei-Rodriguez
Carley Ouelette
Janice Sumpton
Jennifer Daly Cyr
Lesley Singer
Lori Montgomery
Mary-Ann Fitzcharles
Mike Wong
Co-Chair - Nader Ghasemlou
Co-Chair - John Pereira
Co-Chair - Helena Daudt