Dr. Vivianne L. Tawfik

Vivianne Tawfik, MD, PhD is a board-certified Anesthesiologist and Pain Medicine physician. After completing her undergraduate degree at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, she obtained her MD and PhD in Neuroscience at Dartmouth Medical School. She then completed her Anesthesiology Residency in the Fellowship in Anesthesia Research and Medicine (FARM) program at Stanford, of which she now serves as the Director. After completion of her subspecialty fellowship training in Pain Medicine, Dr. Tawfik joined the faculty at Stanford and continues to research the immune contribution to persistent pain using clinically-informed basic science while also caring for patients suffering from chronic pain. Her lab uses a variety of approaches, from single cell sequencing to complex behavioral paradigms in mouse pain models, to investigate the contribution of spinal cord glial cells (microglia & astrocytes) to the transition from acute to chronic pain. She enjoys science, sushi and snowboarding in her free time.