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, focused on her practice in perinatal/parent mental health, infant mental health, and chronic pain. As both a basic behavioural scientist and a clinician-scientist,
Dr. Pillai Riddell leads a multi-national research program that studies parents and babies during painful procedures. 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 is also involved extensively in supporting EDI initiatives in research ecosystems.
She is the Nominated Principal Investigator for DIVERT Mental Health- a multi-million dollar CIHR-funded national training program. DIVERT aims to disrupt the Canadian mental health system by innovating training for mental health trainees, faculty, and practitioners that focuses on promoting diverse knowledges and leverages technology to make services accessible to more Canadians (divertmentalhealth.ca). DIVERT Mental Health is partnered with IBM Canada and more than 30 other academic, industry, and NGO organizations across Canada. She also leads an open-access online learning platform for Canadian researchers on how to adjudicate more inclusively and supportively (https://www.yorku.ca/research/project/polaris/).
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 recently 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.
