Ajay Wasan, MD is certified in pain medicine and psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Wasan is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, as well as Vice Chair for Pain Medicine, Director of the Chronic Pain Research Program, and Director of the Center for Innovation in Pain Care in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine. He completed fellowships at BWH/Harvard Medical School and University of California Davis, residency at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and medical degree at University of Illinois at Chicago.

He has expertise in interventional procedures, neuropathic pain medications, opioids, psychotropic medication, and the psychiatric co-morbidities of chronic pain. He supervises clinical care across 10 hospital pain clinics in the UPMC system, 14 clinical faculty members in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, and all Division of Pain Medicine research.

His current research interests are in the areas of tracking pain treatment outcomes using electronic records, mechanism-based treatment studies of negative affect in pain, quantitative sensory testing, medical informatics, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and preventing prescription opioid misuse in patients with chronic pain. He has authored over 140 publications are in the general area of pain outcomes research and cover topics such as opioid treatment, interventional treatments, neuropathic pain assessment, the brain physiology of chronic pain, and the impact of psychiatric factors on pain response.

Dr. Wasan practices at UPMC Pain Management at Centre Commons and UPMC Pain Management at UPMC Mercy, and is affiliated with UPMC East, UPMC St. Margaret, UPMC Passavant, UPMC Presbyterian, UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, UPMC Shadyside, and UPMC Mercy.

View Dr. Wasan's full list of publications.

Vice Chair, Pain Medicine