Associate Professor Vivianne Tawfik

Associate Professor Vivianne Tawfik is a board-certified anaesthesiologist and pain medicine physician who specialises in the treatment of complex chronic pain disorders including chronic post-operative pain, complex regional pain syndrome and peripheral nerve injury. She is currently an associate professor at Stanford University in the Department of Anaesthesiology, Perioperative & Pain Medicine.

After completing her undergraduate degree at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, she obtained her MD and PhD in neuroscience, with a focus on basic pain mechanisms, at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, NH, USA. She then moved to California to join the Stanford Department of Anaesthesiology, Perioperative & Pain Medicine as an anaesthesiology resident in the Fellowship in Anesthesia Research and Medicine (FARM) program, of which she now serves as the director.

Following completion of her subspecialty fellowship training in pain medicine, Vivianne joined the faculty at Stanford and continues to research the immune contribution to persistent pain using clinically-informed basic science while also caring for patients suffering from chronic pain. Her lab uses a variety of approaches, from single cell sequencing to complex behavioural paradigms in mouse pain models, to investigate the contribution of spinal cord glial cells (microglia and astrocytes) to the transition from acute to chronic pain. She enjoys science, sushi and snowboarding in her free time.