Rebecca Pillai Riddell

Research Interests:

Dr. Pillai Riddell is the Tier 1 York Research Chair in Pain and Mental Health and Director of the Opportunities to Understand Childhood Hurt Laboratory (OUCH Lab ; www.yorku.ca/ouchlab) in the Department of Psychology of York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is also a registered clinical psychologist, licensed to work with children and adults in clinical and health psychology. As both a basic-behavioural scientist and a clinician-scientist, Dr. Pillai Riddell currently leads a multi-national, multi-million dollar research program that studies preterm infants and their parents in Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Her research programs ultimately seek to advance a transdimensional understanding of infant pain (cortical, cardiac, behavioural, and social) and support applications of this understanding for real clinical practice. Her research is funded by all three national Canadian research councils (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council). She has also been involved extensively in supporting EDI initiatives in research contexts at both the institutional and federal levels. She is the founding director of the POLARIS training collaboration to teach academics how to adjudicate faculty for awards and jobs inclusively (https://www.yorku.ca/research/project/polaris/) and is the Nominated Principal Investigator for DIVERT Mental Health. DIVERT Mental Health is a multi-million-dollar CIHR-funded national training program setting out to disrupt the Canadian mental health system by innovating curriculum for mental health trainees that focuses on more diverse knowledges and leverages technology to make mental health services more accessible (divertmentalhealth.ca).

Pillai Riddell is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. She was also awarded the 2020 Canadian Pain Society’s Outstanding Mentorship Award and the 2019 American Pain Society’s Jeffrey Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain.