Faculty at the University of Washington come from all over the world to teach, learn new techniques and conduct research. Faculty have offices and labs in many of the city's hospitals. They have a wide range of interests and residents are encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity to learn varied approaches to anesthesia practice.
May 2013

Deepak Sharma, MBBS, MD, DM, Associate Professor & Chief, Division of Neuroanesthesia & Perioperative Neuroscience, HMC,
Karen L. Posner, PhD, Laura Cheney Professor in Anesthesia Patient Safety, UWMC,
were nominated and approved for membership by the Association of University Anesthesiologists (AUA) during its recently held annual meeting in Miami, Florida.
Clemens Ortner, MD, MSc, DESA, Assistant Professor, UWMC, received the Research in Education award at the 2013 Annual SOAP Meeting in Puerto Rico for his presented paper on "Long-term Retention after Repeated High-fidelity Simulation in Obstetric Anesthesia."
April 2013
The Division of Pain Medicine Receives Purple Hearth Service Foundation Grant
The Military Order of the Purple Heart Service Foundation (MOPHSF) and the UW Division of Pain Medicine are joining forces to assist veterans with treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and acute and chronic pain.
March 2013
Greg Terman, MD, PhD, UW Medicine Professor, Dept. of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine, UWMC, has been selected as President-elect for the American Pain Society with his two year term starting May 2014.
Tonya M. Palermo, PhD, UW Medicine Professor, Dept. of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine, SCH, was recently elected as Director at Large for the American Pain Society for a three year term starting May 2013.
Dr. Dennis Turk is the John & Emma Bonica Professor of Anesthesiology & Pain Research and Director of C-PRIME (Center for Pain Research on Impact, Measurement, and Effectiveness). Dr. Turk and Dr. Robert H. Dworkin of the University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, spearheaded the formation in 2002 of IMMPACT: Initiative on Methods, Measurement, and Pain Assessment in Clinical Trials.
IMMPACT is an ongoing string of summits devoted to driving consensus in conduct of clinical trials for chronic pain. Participants include academic scientists, regulatory agencies, health research funding agencies, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies. Cumulatively, well over 200 specialists have participated in 15 meetings over the last ten years. To date, 16 manuscripts have been published and several more are in preparation based on IMMPACT meetings and associated projects. In essence, IMMPACT gives pain researchers, regulators, and industry a common set of principles for how to conduct a clinical trial—principles that they are working out together.
IMMPACT continues as a yearly consensus meeting in its original form although still evolving and taking up issues that were barely on the radar in 2002. At the next meeting, June 14-15, 2013, in Washington, DC, IMMPACT will look at approaches to phenotyping study subjects, including the use of patient-reported measures, clinician ratings, and quantitative sensory testing, with the goal being to identify pain mechanisms and predict treatment response. For more information on IMMPACT and this meeting, go to their website: www.immpact.org.
February 2013
Dr. Sumidtra Prathep is a Thai anesthesiologist and visiting scholar in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, based at Harborview Medical Center. She has been with the Department for nearly 2 years working on clinical research projects with the Vavilala research group. Starting July 2013, Dr. Prathep will join one of a dozen trainees as a recipient of the prestigious NIH Fogarty Global Health Fellowship. This is the first time that an anesthesiologist has received this award. Dr. Prathep will be a Fogarty Fellow at her home institution, Songklanagarind Hospital, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand and continue her research collaborations with the UW Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine.
The NIH Fogarty-funded Northern/Pacific Global Health Research Fellows Training Consortium offers mentored clinical research training experiences in low– and middle–income countries to post-doctorate and doctoral students in the health professions. The purpose of the program is to provide outstanding mentored research training to post-doctorate trainees and doctoral students at six international partner institutions with robust clinical research programs. Opportunities for an 11-month fellowship through the University of Washington are available in Ghana, Kenya, Peru, Uganda and Thailand. Dr. Prathep's area of research focus will be injury research, focusing on traumatic brain injury. Details of the fellowship can be found at: http://fogartyfellows.org/program-overview
July, 2012
More than 90 UW Medicine doctors were recognized in the "Top Docs" issue. Seattle Magazine collaborated with Castle Connolly Medical Ltd. to create the survey. All licensed physicians in King County and portions of Snohomish, Kitsap and Pierce counties were invited to nominate peers through a special website. With the support of the marketing staffs at hospitals in the Seattle area, participants submitted 17,972 nominations.
The following Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine doctors were chosen among 160 other UW Medicine doctors as tops in their field for 2012 by "Seattle Met Magazine".
The Seattle Met magazine list covers specialties and represents the top 5 percent of practitioners in their fields as of May, 2012. The Seattle Met survey was conducted in partnership with Avvo, which rates and profiles 90 percent of the doctors in the United States including all of the doctors in Washington state. Avvo's proprietary methodology rates physicians on a 10-point scale. It relies not only on peer endorsements, but also on such factors as experience, training, disciplinary history, fellowships, hospital privileges, awards and information from certifying and licensing boards.
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