2013 Jeffery Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain Relief

Carlton Dampier, MD

Carlton Dampier, MD, received his medical degree in 1978 from the University of Chicago. During his fellowship training at Wyler’s Children’s Hospital (now the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital), Dr. Dampier’s interest in pediatric pain management was sparked when he provided home hospice services for terminally ill children with cancer. He later assumed clinical responsibility for the pediatric sickle cell program and scientific responsibility for the local site of a large multicenter National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded natural history study of sickle cell disease complications.

In 1988, Dr. Dampier was recruited to Philadelphia and joined the medical staff of St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children as the director of the Sickle Cell Program, which included more than 400 children, adolescents, and young adults with sickle cell disease. While in Philadelphia, Dr. Dampier was the medical director of the Marian Anderson Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center, one of the then 10 NIH-funded Comprehensive Sickle Cell Centers, and cochaired the Pain Special Interest Group of the National Comprehensive Sickle Cell Centers Program. He also chaired the Sickle Cell Disease Clinical Research Network and conducted one of the first multicenter clinical trials of analgesic management for sickle pain among hospitalized patients.

Dr. Dampier moved to Atlanta in 2008, where he currently is a professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine, and practices at the AFLAC Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta, which has the largest sickle cell program in the United States. He has begun a number of research programs in Atlanta, including NIH-funded validation studies of new quality of life and pain assessment tools from the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System network. Dr. Dampier’s activities with APS include coauthoring Guideline for the Management of Acute and Chronic Pain in Sickle Cell Disease in 1999. In 2011 at the APS Annual Scientific Meeting he became the inaugural chair of the Pain in Sickle Cell Disease Special Interest Group, which he founded the previous year to foster clinical and scientific collaborations between the pain and hematology communities.

The Jeffrey Lawson Award was established in 1996 in memory of Jeffrey Lawson, whose mother, Jill, brought to the attention of professional organizations the practice of performing surgery and other procedures on children without the benefit of analgesia. The award recognizes advocacy efforts to improve management of pain in children.