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October 2015 Honorary Degree Recipient

Doctor of Laws (honoris causa)

Kenneth Denton Craig, O.C., PhD, is a pioneering researcher whose work has transformed perceptions about pain. In the course of a 50-year career, Dr. Craig has published landmark papers, mentored new generations of researchers and served as a leader in university administration.

After earning a PhD in clinical psychology from Purdue University in 1964, Dr. Craig joined the psychology faculty at the University of British Columbia, where he was a full professor until 2003 and remains professor emeritus of psychology and distinguished scholar in residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. In the mid-1970s, he published a series of papers that established how social environment affects the experience of pain. His Social Communication model evolved out of this work and challenged conventional notions of pain as strictly biological.

His seminal 1987 paper, co-authored with graduate student Ruth Grunau, introduced facial response analysis as an effective method of evaluating pain in infants. This discovery inspired a fundamental shift from the perception that babies do not feel pain and led to the rise of facial response analysis as the dominant method for measuring pain in non-verbal patients. This groundbreaking work is part of a publishing career that includes 10 books and more than 200 papers.

He has supervised dozens of graduate students, including many whom are now among Canada鈥檚 top pain researchers. He has also shaped education as an administrator, serving terms as associate dean at UBC鈥檚 Faculty of Graduate Studies and director of its Clinical Psychology graduate program. He has chaired UBC鈥檚 Behavioural Research Ethics Board since 2008 and been editor-in-chief of Pain Research & Management since 2006.

Dr. Craig has earned lifetime achievement awards from the Canadian Psychological Association and the International Association for the Study of Pain.