The Speakers

Dr. Bradley Kerr

Dr. Kerr is a Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Alberta. His research is focused on The development of chronic pain after spinal cord injury or in diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) is a major clinical concern. The main focus of research in his laboratory is aimed at addressing the cellular mechanisms that generate neuropathic pain in these conditions. His research uses two primary animal models: a clinically relevant spinal contusion injury model and a mouse model of autoimmune demyelination that resembles MS, experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE). His research aims to understand the specific pathways and cellular changes that arise in response to direct trauma or in chronic disease states that may promote the development of neuropathic pain. The lab employs a number of different strategies that include analysis at the cell and molecular levels, as well as systems level approaches to address this complex biological problem.

Dr. Bruce Dick

Dr. Dick is a registered clinical psychologist who provides clinical services in the Pediatric Chronic Pain Clinic at Stollery Children’s Hospital and in the Multidisciplinary Pain Centre at the University of Alberta Hospital. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Dalhousie University in the Pediatric Pain Research Laboratory. Some of his doctoral research and clinical training related to chronic pain was also completed at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases in Bath, UK and the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, NS. He was also an AHFMR Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Calgary and Alberta Children’s Hospital in the Behavioural Research Unit. Dr. Dick's research focuses on the effects of chronic pain across the lifespan on a number of factors including cognitive function, disability, sleep, stigmatization of patients, and quality of life.

Dr. Derek Dillane

Dr. Dillane is a Professor and the Chair, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at University of Alberta. He joined the University of Alberta in 2006 where he completed a Clinical and Research Fellowship in regional anesthesia. His clinical research interests involve the use of ultrasound in regional anesthesia with a particular focus on education and training techniques. He has taught and led ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia in numerous workshops in the United States and Canada for both the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and the Canadian Anesthesiologist’s Society.

Dr. Greg Corder

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Corder is a neuroscientist and pain researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is focused on understanding how pain and motivated behaviors emerge from neural circuit activity.

The Corder Lab at the University of Pennsylvania seeks to decipher the neural basis of pain perception, investigate how pathological changes in brain networks drive chronic pain and opioid dependence, and develop novel therapeutic strategies. His research integrates in vivo calcium imaging, optogenetics, viral tool development, single-nuclei RNA sequencing, neuroanatomical tracing, and deep-learning behavior modeling to uncover how brain circuits encode pain, pleasure, and affective states in preclinical rodent models. His lab combines miniscope imaging and machine learning to decode the neural dynamics of pain perception, identifying how nociceptive circuits undergo maladaptive changes leading to chronic pain.Their workaims to map the circuits and molecular mechanisms underlying this transition, providing a framework for developing new, translational pain therapies.

Dr. Melanie Noel

Melanie Noel is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Calgary and a Full Member of the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute and the Hotchkiss Brain Institute. She directs the PEAK (Pain Education, Advocacy, Knowledge) Research Laboratory within the Vi Riddell Pain & Rehabilitation Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Canada.

Dr. Noel’s expertise is on children’s memories for pain and co-occurring mental health issues and pediatric chronic pain. Her work is rooted in a bio-psycho-social-structural understanding of pain, with an increasing emphasis on the social and structural drivers (and solutions!) of this rising, global epidemic. In recognition of her contributions to advancing knowledge of the psychological and social aspects of children’s pain, Dr. Noel received early career awards from the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), the Canadian Pain Society, the American Pain Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Society of Pediatric Psychology. She was named Avenue Magazine Calgary’s Top 40 Under 40 (Class of 2017), a Killam Emerging Research Leader (2020), and holds the inaugural the Killam Memorial Emerging Leader Chair (2021-2026). Recently, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

Dr. Steven Prescott

Steve Prescott completed his MD/PhD at McGill University, where his doctoral research focused on pain processing in the spinal cord. He completed postdoctoral training in computational neuroscience at the Salk Institute in San Diego before starting his own lab at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2012, his lab moved to the Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto and then moved to the University of Calgary in 2025. His lab synergistically combines computational simulations, machine learning and diverse experimental techniques including in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology, calcium imaging, optogenetics, and behavioral analysis. By pursuing multiple intersecting projects with foci ranging from fundamental processes (e.g. how neurons regulate their excitability) to topics with immediate clinical impact (e.g. how to optimize spinal cord stimulation), his lab has made important advances in several areas. The lab is particularly interested in understanding how somatosensory information in normally encoded and how disruption of that coding contributes to chronic pain.

Dr. Anna Taylor

Dr. Taylor’s research program spans the fields of opioid addiction and chronic pain. She 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. Yasmin Nasser

Dr. Yasmin Nasser is a gastroenterologist and Associate Professor at the Cumming School of Medicine. Her laboratory is interested in the role of the microbiome in chronic visceral and somatic pain. This pertains to disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Their overall goal is to develop innovative approaches to the treatment of chronic pain in IBD, thus improving quality of life and preventing the use of chronic narcotic therapy.

Dr. Tejas Sankar

Dr. Sankar is currently a neurosurgeon and an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Alberta. His principal clinical interest is the neurosurgical management of patients with Parkinson’s Disease and other movement disorders using Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), and he is the surgical lead for the DBS program. He also has strong clinical interests in neurooncology, radiosurgery, and neuromodulation for pain disorders.

Dr. Sankar currently serves as Divisional Research Director in Neurosurgery and is the Principal Investigator for the Functional Neurosurgery Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta. The lab currently focuses on the use of multimodal imaging and neurophysiological techniques in order to study the impact of brain stimulation on plasticity in the nervous system, and to develop biomarkers of treatment response across a wide range of neurosurgical illnesses, with specific emphasis on Parkinson's Disease and Trigeminal Neuralgia. Dr. Sankar has received several research awards, including the 2009 Journal of Neuro-Oncology award from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Dr. Sankar is currently an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences (CJNS), and serves as Vice President of the Canadian Neurological Sciences Federation (CNSF).

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