Professor Beth Darnall is an Associate Professor and Director of the Stanford Pain Relief Innovations Lab at Stanford University. She is also the Chief Science Advisor to AppliedVR, a virtual reality therapeutics company.
She and her team develop and investigate brief, scalable, and digital interventions for acute and chronic pain relief. One such treatment, “Empowered Relief”, is a single-session class that rapidly equips individuals with pain relief skills. “Empowered Relief” is available in three languages and is embedded into clinical care in five countries.
Professor Darnall is widely published in peer-reviewed journals and the author or co-author of four books. Her strategies for patient-centered and voluntary opioid tapering are regularly featured in the international press. She has been consulted on pain psychology in media such as ABC News, Scientific American, NPR Radio, BBC Radio, and TIME Magazine, The Guardian, Nature, Forbes, Scientific American and The Washington Post.
Professor Darnall is the Principal investigator for clinical trials funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
Professor Darnall has briefed the US Congress and the US Food and Drug Administration on the pain and opioid crises and specifically has highlighted harms associated with forced opioid tapering. She is a scientific member of NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Opioid Workgroup of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
