Clifford (Cliff) J. Woolf, MD, PhD, works on pain and on the regeneration and degeneration of the nervous system, focusing on neurological disease modeling and drug screening in patient iPSC-derived neurons. He is director of the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center and the Neurobiology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, deputy director of the Intellectual Developmental Disability Disorders Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, and co-director of the neuroscience program of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Clifford was born in South Africa and trained for his MD and PhD degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg before joining University College London where he was professor of neurobiology. In 1997, he moved to Boston as the first incumbent Richard J. Kitz Professor of Anesthesiology Research at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and established the Neural Plasticity Research Group, based in the department of anesthesia and critical care at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Clifford is a faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the department of neurobiology at HMS. Over his career Cliff has received multiple honors and awards for his work in neurology and pain.