Beth Darnall, PhD

A psychologist-scientist, she leads NIH and PCORI-funded national studies on scalable behavioral analgesic interventions and patient-centered opioid reduction.

Her work centers on developing, investigating and disseminating solutions that expand access to evidence-based behavioral pain care across populations. She created Empowered Relief® a 1-session group intervention that rapidly equips individuals with effective pain relief skills for acute, chronic, and post-surgical pain. Empowered Relief® is delivered by certified instructors in 30 countries and in 8 languages.

She has three times briefed the U.S. Congress and the FDA on patient-centered pain care and opioid stewardship. She was a scientific member of the NIH Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (2020-2025), served on the CDC Opioid Workgroup (2021), is Chief Science Advisor for AppliedVR, and is author of four books for patients and clinicians. She has keynoted ational pain society conferences in Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.K. In 2018 she spoke on the psychology of pain relief at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Stanford Faculty Profile and full CV: profiles.stanford.edu/beth-darnall

Twitter/X: @bethdarnall