03/06/2026
We are delighted to learn that one of our alumni, Clifford Woolf, is one of the outstanding researchers from across the world that has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, this year. https://royalsociety.org/news/2026/05/new-fellows-announcement-2026/
Clifford Woolf was one of the first students at Wits to complete the MBBCh and PhD degrees concurrently. His 1979 PhD, on electroanalgesia, was supervised by Duncan Mitchell in the Brain Function Research Group. He left South Africa to join the Middlesex Hospital in London and then University College London, where he worked with legendary pain neuroanatomist Patrick Wall. In 1997 he was appointed to the Chair of Anesthesia Research at Harvard Medical School and later transferred to his current position as Director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. Clifford Woolf is famous for his discovery of pain centralisation (pain that persists without activation of pain sensors) and of pre-emptive analgesia (preventing not relieving surgical pain), and for his research using neurons from human stem cells to study pain.
The photograph shows Clifford Woolf as a PhD student in the Department of Physiology.
