Neil Schechter, MD

President & Chairman of the Board

Dr. Neil Schechter directs the Chronic Pain Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and is an Associate Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. He is the President of ChildKind, a global initiative to reduce pain in children’s healthcare institutions.

Dr. Schechter received his medical degree from the University of Connecticut. He completed pediatric training at the University of Connecticut and fellowships in psychosomatic pediatrics and developmental pediatrics at Children’s Hospital and Harvard University in Boston. He has authored over 120 articles and is the senior editor of Pain in Infants, Children, and Adolescents, the major multi-disciplinary textbook in the area of pediatric pain. He has served on a number of editorial boards and expert committees in the area of pediatric pain including the World Health Organization Expert Committee on Pediatric Pain and Palliative Care, the Task Force on Chronic Pain in Children of the American Pain Society, and the Rome IV Committee on Pediatric Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders. He has given numerous named lectureships and received the Jeffrey Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain Relief from the American Pain Society.

Dr. Schechter’s initial research focus was on documenting the under-treatment of pain in children and attempting to understand its origin. He then became involved in issues of pain associated with chronic disease where his research focused on sickle cell disease and on painful procedures in children with chronic disease. Most recently, he has become interested in the more common pains associated with pediatric practice such as injection pain and functional pain syndromes as well as developing strategies to alter pain-related practice patterns in health care providers and institutions.