2019 Frederick W.L. Kerr Basic Science Research Award
Gavril W. Pasternak, MD PhD
Dr. Gavril Pasternak holds the Anne Burnett Tandy Chair in Neurology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and is a Laboratory Head in the Molecular Pharmacology Program within the Sloan Kettering Institute. After receiving his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees and completing his clinical training in Neurology at Johns Hopkins, he joined the faculty at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1979. He is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Neurology and of the American Neurological Association. His research has focused on opioid receptors and their mechanisms of action, resulting in over 400 publications and 14 patents. He has served on the Editorial Boards of numerous scientific journals. He is a recipient of a Senior Scientist Award and a MERIT Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and has served on their Board of Scientific Counselors. He is a member of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and has been awarded the Millenium Prize from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the John J. Bonica Award from the Eastern Pain Association, the Julius Axelrod Award of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the S. Weir Mitchell Award from the American Academy of Neurology. He has been honored with the 2014 William Potter Lecture at Thomas Jefferson University, the 6th Donald W. Benson Lectureship on Pain Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the 1st Annual Machaskee Memorial Lectureship at the Cleveland Clinic.
This award and lectureship were established in 1987 in honor of Frederick W. L. Kerr, a founder of the American Pain Society, to recognize individual excellence and achievement in pain scholarship. Since then, the Kerr medallion has been presented to 25 outstanding pain professionals—researchers and clinicians—whose career achievements have made important contributions to the field of pain.
