Stephen Brendan McMahon

Professor McMahon received a number of awards for his research, including the Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience Award from the British Neuroscience Association (2019), the Patrick Wall Lecture from the Australian Pain Society (2018), the John J. Bonica Distinguished Lecture Award from the International Association for the Study of Pain (2016), and the GL Brown Lecturer Award from the Physiological Society (2001).

He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 1999.

Professor McMahon's research trajectory was strongly influenced by Patrick Wall with whom he trained at University College London and St Thomas' Hospital in the 1980s. Like Patrick Wall, Professor McMahon is remembered as a world-leading pain research expert.

Professor McMahon was educated at the University of Leeds where he was awarded a BSc (Hons) and PhD in Physiology. His PhD was supervised by John F B Morrison and completed in 1979 with a thesis entitled 'An electrophysiological study of spinal neurons activated by stimulation of the abdominal viscera'.

Stephen "Mac" McMahon (21 December 1954 - 9 October 2021), FMedSci, was the Sherrington Professor of Physiology at King's College London, and Director of the Wellcome Trust / London Pain Consortium. Professor McMahon led a world-renowned research laboratory at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases in central London from 1985-2021.

An outstanding educator as well as researcher, Professor McMahon was the editor of Wall and Melzack’s Textbook of Pain, 5th and 6th Edition (7th Edition in preparation). He published more than 300 research articles in scientific journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Cell, Neuron and the Journal of Neuroscience, with an H-index of 91.