Skip to Content

Ajay D. Wasan, MD, MSc

Title
  • Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine 
  • Vice Chair for Pain Medicine
  • Director, Chronic Pain Research Program
  • Director, Center for Innovation in Pain Care
Description

Dr. Wasan 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 eight 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.

His 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,  medical informatics, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and preventing prescription opioid misuse in patients with chronic pain. He has authored over 140 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.

Dr. Wasan received his MD and completed fellowships in Interventional Pain Medicine and Clinical and Translational Science at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.