Clifford Woolf

Clifford J. Woolf, MD, PhD, works on pain and on the regeneration and degeneration of the nervous system, focusing on neurological disease modeling and drug screening in patient iPSC-derived neurons. Dr. Woolf is the Director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center and the Neurobiology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.

He trained for his M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg South Africa before joining University College London, where he was a professor of neurobiology. Dr. Woolf moved to Boston as the first incumbent of the Richard J Kitz Chair of Anesthesia Research at Harvard Medical School and established the Neural Plasticity Research Group, based in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Woolf has received numerous prestigious awards, including a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Gill Distinguished Scientist Award, the Kerr Award from the American Pain Society, the Javits Award from NINDS, the American Society of Anesthesiologists Award, the Reeve-Irvine Medal, the Magnes Medal, and the Wall Medal from the Royal College of Anesthetists.