Amy Baxter

Why you should listen

Pediatric emergency physician Amy Baxter's wide-ranging medical research career has included work on PTSD, pain relief for infants and much more. Perhaps most notably, she is the pioneer behind the Baxter Animated Retching Faces Scale, a tool to assess and monitor the presence and severity of nausea. The scale has been validated in multiple languages and is now regularly used to improve relief for children with cancer.

On a mission to eliminate unnecessary pain, Baxter founded Pain Care Labs in 2006. Distressed by other doctors' indifference to needle pain, she developed a prototype to help moms get their kids vaccinated pain-free. This led to the launch of Buzzy, a device that can help with needle fear and pain — and which has now been used in more than 45 million procedures. Having quit formal medicine in 2016 to focus on research and innovation, her current NIH-funded work focuses on providing alternatives to opioid use for lower back pain.