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A nurse practitioner won the Gairdner Award for his research at the Toronto Hospital’s Sick Children’s Hospital dedicated to helping children and adolescents manage pain.
The Toronto-based Gairdner Foundation said Jennifer Stinson was the first to receive a prestigious award, and each year it received a prestigious award to recognize scientists who contribute to human health around the world.
Stinson said she will speak with her on the Australian phone, which he said was “great” and that the award was recognizing the role nurses played in the study.
“Nurses are very good at listening to patients and learning from them, and then trying to figure out which solution is best for them,” Statham said.
Stinson is one of two winners of the 2025 Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Award, a $100,000 prize for Canadian intermediate researchers to “excellent scientific research contributions.” The foundation said in a press release released Friday.
Another recipient is Daniel de Carvalho, a senior scientist at the University of Toronto Health Network Margaret Cancer Center. He won the “groundbreaking” study of cancer cell changes and how to make cells more easily recognized by the immune system.
Five scientists working at institutions in the United States won the Canadian Gailderner International Awards, with a prize of $250,000 each.
Another scientist at a Finnish university won the John Dex Canada Gairdner Global Health Award worth $100,000.
Stinson is co-director of the Sickkids Hospital Pain Center. Her research focuses on developing digital tools from applications to robots that can help children with chronic pain due to diseases like arthritis, sickle cell disease, and cancer.
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An app called ICancope helps children and teenagers track pain and learn to manage it.
“A lot of kids don’t see it, for example, if they have excessive contact one day, or if they have poor sleep, the pain will be affected. So, having a quick check-in every day, it shows their pain, kind of like a heat map of how their activities affect their pain.”
The app can also help them set goals, such as improving sleep or going to school, and get evidence-based advice on how to achieve them.
“It could be mindfulness, meditation, maybe sports activities like yoga, maybe strategies to change their thinking and feeling about pain,” she said.
Stinson said Icancope also provides children with a “safe space” to get social support and share experiences such as their favorite ways to get themselves out of painful attention.
Her team also developed a four-foot-tall robot Medi that interacts with children undergoing painful programs at Sickkids.
Stinson said MEDI is a “perfect role model” in how young children teach what happens in their programs and ways to help relieve pain.
“So the robot will experience how to breathe the abdomen with the child. It will distract them with dance and music,” she said.
Stinson and her team are now conducting clinical trials with an artificial intelligence-enhanced robot that can observe medical procedures and respond when the child is not going well or the child is upset.
She said that patient input is crucial for all pain management interventions.
“We really try to listen to them and learn from them and participate in all aspects of the research, so not only are participants, but actually help us design the research research and then translate that knowledge,” she said.
In fact, Statham’s now established former patients “few” decided to pursue medical, nursing or health research, she said. One of them works in her lab.
“It’s really nice to see patients who are really inspired to do research,” she said.
The Gairdner Award was founded in 1957 by Canadian businessman and philanthropist James A. Gairdner. The 2025 international champion is:
-dr. Michael Welsh of the University of Iowa and Paul Negulescu of Vertex Pharmaceuticals study transforming cystic fibrosis from a fatal disease to a manageable disease;
– Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas of Harvard Medical School, Iva Greenwald of Columbia University and Gary Struhl of Columbia University’s groundbreaking “Notch signaling” cellular communication and its impact on cancer and developmental disorders.
The 2025 Gairdner Global Health Award winner is Dr. André Briend of the University of Tampere, Finland, for his role in inventing ready-made therapeutic food pastes to treat severe acute malnutrition.
& Copy 2025 Canadian Press
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