Rachel Zoffness, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, medical consultant, educator, and author specializing in chronic pain, medical illness, and injury. She provides cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to teens and adults, provides lectures and trainings, and serves as a consultant to hospitals and health professionals. Zoffness—also known as ‘Dr. Z’—teaches at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, providing pain neuroscience education to medical residents and interns. She was trained at Brown; Columbia; the University of California, San Diego; San Diego State University; the New York University Child Study Center; Mount Sinai West; and the Mindful Center.

Zoffness taught undergraduate psychology courses at San Diego State University, supervised therapists-in-training at the Wright Institute Berkeley Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Clinic, and has published extensively on evidence-based therapies. She serves on the steering committee of the American Association of Pain Psychology (AAPP), founded AAPP’s pediatric division, and is a member of the East Bay Pediatrician’s Journal Club. She collaborates with UCSF’s Pediatric Brain Center, and Pain and Palliative Care Clinic; Stanford’s Pediatric Pain Management Clinic; the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine; and consults on the development of international pain programs. When not seeing patients, Rachel can typically be found hiking and chasing butterflies.

Foreword writer Elliot J. Krane, MD, is a graduate of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, and completed his medical training in pediatrics and anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital. He has held faculty positions at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital, where he and his colleague Donald C. Tyler, MD, started the first pain clinic for children in the US.