Joel Katz

Dr. Katz is the Transitional Pain Service Research Lead. He is Research Director of the Pain Research Unit in the Department of Anesthesia and Pain Management at Toronto General Hospital and a Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is also a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health Psychology at York University in Toronto.

Dr. Katz received his PhD in clinical psychology at McGill University and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto and the Toronto General Hospital. He has published extensively and has received numerous awards for research excellence. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Pain, the official journal of the Canadian Pain Society.

As TPS Research Lead, Dr. Katz oversees research to better understand the psychological, emotional, and biomedical factors involved in pain. He and his students and colleagues at the TPS are exploring factors responsible for the transition of acute, time-limited pain to chronic, pathological pain after major surgery, including cancer-related procedures and transplant surgeries. They are also actively evaluating interventions, such as specialized yoga programs, clinical hypnosis, and other mind-body treatments to reduce acute post-operative pain and prevent the transition to chronicity.