Nurse wins prestigious award, for helping kids with chronic pain

A nurse practitioner whose research at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children is dedicated to helping children and teens manage pain has won a Gairdner Award.

The Toronto-based Gairdner Foundation says Jennifer Stinson is the first nurse to receive one of the prestigious awards it hands out annually to recognize scientists who contribute to human health around the world.

Reached by phone in Australia where she was set to speak at a scientific gathering, Stinson says it's "great" the prize is recognizing the role nurses play in research.

"Nurses are very good at listening to patients and learning from them and then trying to figure out what kind of solutions would be best for them," Stinson said, noting that a lot of her research is "team science" with researchers from multiple disciplines.

Stinson is one of two recipients of the 2025 Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Award, a $100,000 prize given to Canadian mid-career investigators for "exceptional scientific research contributions," the foundation said in a news release issued Friday.

The other recipient is Daniel De Carvalho, a senior scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre at University Health Network and an associate professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto. He won for his "groundbreaking" research of alterations in cancer cells and how to make the cells more recognizable to the immune system.

Five scientists working at institutions in the United States won Canada Gairdner International Awards of $250,000 each.

Another scientist working at a university in Finland received the John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, worth $100,000.

Stinson is co-director of the Pain Centre at SickKids Hospital. Her research focuses on developing digital tools — from apps to robots — that help kids with chronic pain due to illnesses such as arthritis, sickle cell disease and cancer.

One app, called iCanCope, helps children and adolescents track their pain and learn to manage it.

"A lot of kids don't see the connection between, for example, if they overdo it one day or they have poor sleep that their pain is going to be impacted. So it's just a quick check-in every day and it shows them, kind of like a heat map, how their activities have influenced their pain," Stinson said.

The app also helps them set goals, such as improving their sleep or going to school, and get evidence-based advice on how to achieve them.

"It can be mindfulness, meditations, it could be physical activities such as yoga, it could be strategies on changing the way they think and feel about their pain," she said.

iCanCope also provides a "safe space" for kids to get social support and share experiences, such as their favourite ways to distract themselves from pain, said Stinson, who is also a professor at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto.

Her team also developed a four-foot tall robot named Medi that interacts with children undergoing painful procedures at SickKids.

Medi is a "perfect example" of how to teach younger children about what will happen during their procedure and ways to help reduce the pain, Stinson said.

"So the robot would go through how to do belly breathing with a child. It would distract them using dancing and music," she said.

Stinson and her team are now running a clinical trial on a robot enhanced by artificial intelligence that can observe a medical procedure and react if it's not going well or if a child becomes upset.

For all of the pain management interventions, input from patients is critical, she said.

"We really try to listen to them and learn from them and involve them in all aspects of research, so not just as participants, but actually helping us design research studies and then translating that knowledge," she said.

In fact, a "handful" of Stinson's now-adult former patients have decided to pursue medicine, nursing or health research, she said. One of them works in her lab.

"It's so rewarding to see patients that are really inspired to do research as well," she said.

The Gairdner Awards were established in 1957 by Canadian businessman and philanthropist James A. Gairdner. The 2025 international winners are:

• Dr. Michael Welsh of the University of Iowa and Paul Negulescu of Vertex Pharmaceuticals for research that has transformed cystic fibrosis from a fatal disease to a manageable one;
• Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas of Harvard Medical School, Iva Greenwald of Columbia University and Gary Struhl of Columbia University for pioneering work in "Notch signalling" cell communication and its impact in cancer and developmental disorders.

The 2025 Gairdner Global Health award winner is Dr. Andre Briend of the University of Tampere in Finland, for his role in inventing a ready-to-use therapeutic food paste for treating severe acute malnutrition.

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