Melanie Noel

Melanie Noel is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Calgary and a Full Member of the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute and the Hotchkiss Brain Institute. She directs the PEAK (Pain Education, Advocacy, Knowledge) Research Laboratory within the Vi Riddell Pain & Rehabilitation Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Canada. She has been a close collaborator of Dr. Vervoort since 2015.

Dr. Noel’s expertise is on children’s memories for pain, co-occurring mental health issues and intergenerational trauma and pain. She published guiding conceptual models of children’s pain memory development, co-occurring PTSD and chronic pain, and fear-avoidance. She  closely collaborates with Dr. Vervoort and her team to examine cognitive (memory, attention) and social (parent-child reminiscing) factors in children’s remembering of pain using experimental and clinical designs across Belgium and Canada. 
 
In recognition of her contributions to advancing knowledge of the psychological aspects of children’s pain, Dr. Noel received early career awards from the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), the Canadian Pain Society, the American Pain Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Society of Pediatric Psychology. She was named Avenue Magazine Calgary’s Top 40 Under 40 (Class of 2017), a Killam Emerging Research Leader (2020), and holds the inaugural the Killam Memorial Emerging Leader Chair (2021-2026). Recently, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Dr. Noel is passionate about partnering with people with lived experience to transform how we understand and treat people with pain, everywhere. She is an advocate for the use of developmentally tailored interventions for pain and mental health and develops family programs to break intergenerational cycles of trauma and pain.