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Ajay D. Wasan, MD, MSc

  • Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Psychiatry
  • Vice Chair for Pain Medicine
  • Director, Center for Innovation in Pain Care
  • Director, Chronic Pain Research Program

 

Dr. Wasan is the Vice Chair for Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at UPMC and a Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Psychiatry in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He has particular expertise in interventional procedures, neuropathic pain medications, opioids, psychotropic medication, and the psychiatric co-morbidities of chronic pain.

He supervises clinical care across seven hospital pain clinics in the UPMC system, 10 clinical faculty members in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, and all Division of Pain Medicine research. This research is funded by a variety of sources such as the National Institutes of Health and industry.

    Education & Training

  • BA, BS, University of Illinois
  • MD, MSc, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School
  • Fellowships in Interventional Pain Medicine and Clinical and Translational Science, Department of Anesthesiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Representative Publications

Dr. Wasan's publications can be reviewed through the National Library of Medicine's publication database.

Research, Clinical, and/or Academic Interests

Dr. Wasan’s current research interests are in the areas of tracking pain treatment outcomes using electronic records, mechanism-based treatment studies of negative affect in pain, quantitative sensory testing,  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and preventing prescription opioid misuse in patients with chronic pain. His publications are in the general area of pain outcomes research and cover topics such as opioid treatment, interventional treatments, neuropathic pain assessment, the brain physiology of chronic pain, and the impact of psychiatric factors on pain response. Most recently, he is working more in medical informatics and created a data repository of patient-reported outcomes coupled with electronic medical record data gathered from each patient at each visit seen across the Division of Pain Medicine. This is the Patient Outcomes Repository for Treatment (PORT) which uses the Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry software (CHOIR) to collect the patient-reported outcomes.