2019 Jeffrey Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain Relief
Rebecca Pillai Riddell, PhD CPsych
Dr. Rebecca Pillai Riddell is Associate Vice-President Research at York University (Toronto, Canada), alongside being a Full Professor and Director of the Opportunities to Understand Childhood Hurt Laboratory (OUCH Lab). As a clinical psychologist, her research program over the past 20 years has focused on the critical role caregivers play in shaping the development of infant pain responding. She has created the largest cohort to date examining the development of behavioural pain responses in infants over the first five years of life- The OUCH Cohort. Through stringent observational procedures and powerful statistical models, she has built an unrivalled body of literature examining the mechanisms by which parents influence the expression of pain in their young child. Going beyond the theory, she has integrated her passion in promulgating the power of parents into a number of national and international initiatives that target both parents and health professionals directly. Her research is supported by all four major federal research funding councils (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and Canada Foundation for Innovation). In addition, she is also an award-winning mentor who is dedicated to training the next generation of research leaders. In addition to her own large behavioural science laboratory, she helps lead the Pain in Child Health initiative (Co-PI 2015-2018; Co-Chair 2015-2017; National Collaborator 2018-), an international training program for graduate research trainees that has worked with over 300 trainees worldwide since its inception.
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.
